return to

sender
Curator: Astrid Joyce
Artists: Andrew Harper, Jacob Leary, Kevin Leong,
Amy Spiers, Philippa Steele & Fred Showell
Saturday 24 October Sunday 6 December 2009, Burnie Regional Art Gallery
PLACE THIS LOVE
Consider a lost letter journeying through a complex system of
numbered boxes and bags, travelling towards tattered neglect. RETURN
TO SENDER is a glaringly slashed envelope setting out from home
intending to reach SOMEWHERE. But now it lies neither home nor
somewhere, neither origin nor destination. It is neither here nor there.
It has been misdirected, its not where it should be, but perhaps with
sufcient luck and random care it may get back, only to try again
Something of this trope informs our embodied relation to places : the
inanimate parcel carrying meaning and seeking, without certainty, to
communicate it from place to place. If the letter is old-fashioned so too
the experience of, and commitment to, a particular locale.
Love This Place is the exhortation of our government-run advertising
campaign. Perhaps a warning entreaty to maintain the high praise
of Tasmanias beautiful wilderness and its pristine environment.
Or is it a desperate demographic plea in response to the vacating
hoards of twenty-somethings venturing out of the village, on distant
dispatch, seeking a consummating correspondence as epistled exiles
aiming elsewhere?
Each of the artists in Return to Sender has their own story of departure-
and-return from the State of Tasmania or/and from its regional areas.
RTS aims to gauge each artists response to their leave-taking, their
home-coming or their spooky visitations to this singular state.
As though selling ice to Eskimos Kevin Leongs Adverse Adverts affords
Burnie locals a new way to experience their home town. The project
aims to create a sense of appreciation for the site (i.e. Burnie), not by
directly promoting its virtues, but by creating distaste for their opposing
disadvantages e.g. to promote Burnies peacefulness and calm.
Kevin draws on the commonplace that a tourist has a somewhat
falsied experience of a place; everything is fed, sold, promoted and
instructed to you before you get out the door. Upon leaving home the
throwaway paraphernalia shapes the experience yet to come. Kevins
work mirrors the must-sees and dont-miss-out glossy advertising
initiatives presented to people at the start of their tourist experience.
Also dealing in subversions and inversions Philippa Steele, collaborating
with husband Fred Showell, in Blind Travel converges audio and visual
in a series of projected images of Tasmanian landscapes. However the
artists have delicately extracted all dening, localising, characteristics
leaving a new undiscovered landscape. The composition of the
images aims to defamiliarise the viewer and redirect the senses into
the other elements that create meaning in landscapes (mainly sonic)
thus creating an entirely new and unique take on the familiar.
Blind Travel tricks the viewer by restricting the visual experience of
a landscape forcing a misdirection of the sensorium to lead to the
revelation that everywhere is the same. The familiar is found in the
foreign and vice versa, and there is disclosive power in not knowing
the prescribed truth and reality of a place.
Airports all look, smell and feel the same - everywhere in the world,
just another gate, another turnstile another gruff security guard
telling you to remove your shoes. There is something appealing
about this reassuring repetition. But the generic nature of the airport
is also an insidious conduit for the homogenisation of everyplace.
Jacob Learys installation Placelessness directly references the
movement of people through such landscapes and the assimilation of
the local into the global.
A placeless landscape is void of new experience. Each town and
city ock to Coles and Kmart where each visit feels just like the last.
Cities across the world are converging, beginning to look the same,
implementing the same housing solutions for chartered and explained
populations - the same organised and controlled mass, mechanised,
innumerable and negligible.
Securing and overcoming the inimitable is also the work of the
photocopier a most prized object in any learning centre. Make it
Happen (echoing the unsettling and urgent redundancy of the love this
place decree) invites members of the local community to the Burnie
Regional Gallery to use a free photocopier to copy their community
notices as they see t, whether to promote an event, exhibition
opening, a lost pet, a house party, pretty much anything that involves
the help or the involvement of the local people. All the artist asks in
return is that you leave a copy of the printed yer, invite or zine for the
gallery visitor to inspect. Through the notices an outsider can look into
what makes the people of Burnie different (or the same) to those of
any other place. The photocopier here functions as a tool in exposing
the individuality of a place and its inhabitants.
From displacements and disarrangements, Andrew Harpers R(e)AD
transports you to a wholly imaginary landscape, a non-space, free
from geography and visual experience - a placeless void splicing a
fairytale with something dark and disturbed. Although fanciful ights
offer a temporary escape from your own surroundings their ongoing
effect is to render mysterious your connection to your own place.
R(e)AD might be another desperate injunction, like Love or Make or
Return, or it may be a conclusive declaration of something nished
with. Its ambiguity enjoins that new passings and parsings are always
required. The interpretable and illegible signs commingle confusingly.
The destination is uncertain and so the letters must be returned and
given another chance
Astrid Joyce
September 2009
ANDREW HARPER - Artist
Andrew is a hybrid artist who blends forms and genres and whose practice
changes with a high degree of uidity. Moving through experimental lm,
performance and expanded cineman, Andrew is beginning to delve into what
could be described as conceptually informed sculpture.
Andrews main area of current investigation includes, but are in no way limited
to, concepts of value and consumption that ow through art practices into
everyday life and its traditions and rituals. Andrews practice reects his life
and is in a state of ux, and this too informs the nature of his work.
Image: Andrew Harper, still from RE(a)D (performance video component),
2009, materials: performer, red wine, image credit: the artist.
AMY SPIERS - Artist
Amy Spiers, 27, is a photographer and writer. Since 2006 Amy has been documenting
the interaction between strangers in The Photobooth Project, which has appeared at the
Falls Festival, The Melbourne International Comedy Festival and The White Street Project
in Frankston, as well as 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival where it won the Best Special
Event Award.
During 2008 Amy, in collaboration with Victoria Stead, presented a community engaged
project in Brunswick called Agents of Proximity for the Next Wave Festival. Details of the
project can be found at www.agentsofproximity.org.
Amy has also written for Artlink Magazine, RMIT gallery and Gertrude Contemporary
Art Spaces, and has been a guest speaker on interdisciplinary and socially engaged art
practice at This Is Not Art Festival and the Melbourne Emerging Writers Festival.
Image: Amy Spiers, The free photocopier in the ofce of Duncan Kerr, 2009,
image credit: Ron Spiers.
PHILIPPA STEELE - Artist
Philippa Steele is a Tasmanian-born artist and designer. Early investigations
into graphic and exhibition design have led to her interest in installation and
performance art. With a strong interest in community intervention and interaction,
her works explore the vagaries of visual evidence as the validation of truth.
Since completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at the University of
Tasmania in Hobart, she has worked concurrently as designer, creative consultant
and entrepreneur working on a range of public art and design projects. She
now lives in Launceston and is creating a studio within her new home.
Fred Showell is Philippas husband long time listener, rst time caller.
She wrote upon it Return to sender, address unknown. He dropped it in the
mailbox, and sent it special D.
Image: Philippa Steele and Fred Showell, I see things better with my feet, 2009,
digital image, dimensions variable.
ASTRID JOYCE - Curator
Astrid Joyce was born in Burnie in 1984. She is an active member of the Tasmanian arts community. Astrid is currently employed at Despard Gallery as a gallery
coordinator and is also a board member of Six_a Inc artist run initiative in North Hobart and currently completing a bachelor of Fine Art at the University of
Tasmania. She has worked on various festivals from Chenin de Arte in France and as a program coordinator for Critical Animals at This Is Not Art, Newcastle.
Her art practice spans across sculpture, video and installation and deals with issues relating to place and placelessness within the urban environment.
I would like to thank Amy Spiers, Philippa Steele, Fred Showell, Andrew Harper and Kevin Leong for their dedication and the Burnie Regional Gallery for their support.
This exhibition has received assistance through the Tasmanian Emerging Curator Fund supported by Arts Tasmania.
All welcome. Admission free.
Burnie Regional Art Gallery, Cultural Precinct, Wilmot Street, Burnie, Tasmania
P: 03 6430 5875 E: gallery@burnie.net F: 03 6431 4114 W. www.burniearts.net
Gallery hours: Mon to Fri 10am to 4:30pm and Sat, Sun & Public Holidays 1:30pm to 4:30pm
Catalogue & Invitation Design: Emma Duncan
ISBN: 978-0-9806251-2-7
JACOB LEARY - Artist
Jacob Leary is a Hobart based artist who is currently completing a
Masters degree after nishing his honours at the Tasmanian School
of Art, University of Tasmania in 2008.
Jacobs practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking
and recently video, and currently utilises invented visual and
informational systems which are extended through each medium.
Previously a student of Architecture his practice often makes
reference to technology and knowledge, progress and catastrophe
and the place of human beings within these forces.
Jacob is represented by Despard Gallery, Hobart.
Image: Jacob Leary, Placelessness (Trial), 2009, mixed media,
dimensions variable, image credit: the artist.
KEVIN LEONG - Artist
Kevin Leong was born in 1970 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and has lived in Australia
since 1982. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the
University of Sydney, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania.
His current works create absurd but oddly plausible situations that prompt thought
about our often anxious, over-rationalised social environment and he works across
various media including photography, graphic design, sculpture, sound, video
and installation.
He has exhibited at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Spaces
Tasmania, the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, INFLIGHT (Hobart) and has received a
commission from Ten Days on the Island. He has recently returned from a residency at
the Chteau de La Motte-Tilly in the Champagne-Ardenne region in France.
Image: Kevin Leong, /Keep It or Lose It/ Community Service Announcement, 2009, still from single-channel video, dimensions variable.
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