REVIEW: Awaiting the Night to Fall at Until Never

Why do fairy tales exist? Why do we tell stories now? To lie, to intrigue, to impress and amaze or to simply to entertain with a well exercised imagination. Pascale Mira Tschäni and Michael Husmann Tschäni are story tellers, on the whole their works present a world not so dissimilar to our own in appearance, so that the viewer has a way in to their fabrication, but as familiarity within the story builds it becomes clear that the details are otherworldly visions.

This neuvo- visual fairytale habitat that their protagonists is spread out across multiple mediums: painting, comics, illustration, installation, film, performance and even garments, all of which act as portals for the viewer. These multiple modes of storytelling that are represented in a number of different mediums give each other strength by unifying with a similar aesthetic and colour schemes.

The duo’s paintings are a tribute to the success of their collaborative efforts as a team and to ability to seamlessly mix differing icon and imagery during construction to arrive at a highly finished and balanced work.

Their Individual mastery of the medium is equally impressive as they combine the use of enamel, oil paint, water colour, crayon, glitter and aerosol in each work to arrive at a holistic finish which could have at any stage of the works practical development quite easily have become an ugly stew of contrasting and opposing mixed media. This is especially noteworthy as the pair work by painting backwards on sheets of clear acrylic.

The Husmann/Tschäni mythos is the conceptual bloodline that runs under the surface of all of their work, whether it’s a short comic or a structural installation dominating a galleries’ floor space. The world that is created within any of their works is emulated and expanded upon within every other work. It’s an imagined word of forests in which nature is an equal, children dig up treasure chests in the snow and psychic auras are visible as bright glowing fields. A world in which dreams are realised with stories.

REVIEW: Crystals of the Colossus- Shida

Shida drops a new mythology in his painted works. A mythology of men as their own demons, warriors, made in the image of their gods. His exhibition ‘Crystals of the Colossus’ at Until Never read like one the the original Grimm Brothers Fairytales: characters with beautiful facades that mask a faintly visible grotesqueness. Their flesh is brightly coloured, evoking a sense of nymph-like magic and goodwill, yet their faces bare smiles of triangular sharpened teeth and eyes that glow maniacally.

These protagonists and antagonists, each a glossy illuminated yin or yang, appear both ancient and futuristic. Their large skulls and elvish ears are equal parts science fiction and medieval fantasy. Shidas subjects athletic bodies are gracefully posed, articulating joints and often simulating movement.

Some images appear to be direct references to very specific folklore, such as St George and the Dragon (above),

whilst within other paintings Shidas characters seem to reflect the poses and atmosphere of works from history’s greatest artists, such as Picassos Young Ladies of Avignon crossed with the composition of a playboy bunny pillow fight (above) which ends up being an uncomfortable flaunting of female nakedness because of its visual distance from realism.

Check out Shidas work from Crystals of the Colossus at: http://www.untilnever.net/projects/crystals-colossus

James Callahan

James Callahan's work is the result of an outside fringe culture turned into advertising illustration, a decade after the fact. It is pure 1980’s skate culture aesthetic distilled into screen prints and fine lined drawings: pure barf (which is also the artists moniker), death, sex, violence, gross-out, ugliness, evil. The advantage of using the imagery, archetypes and icons long after the scene has changed and mutated aesthecially is that it can be viewed retrospectively and consequently, edited ruthlessly in the process of re-creation to formulate a newer, more defined and more potent version of the predecessors that it is climbing onto the shoulders of.

Callahan blends styles, a semi real illustrative tone of thick line-work is fused with the imagery of comic book sensibilities. Essentially everything is about failure on some level and to some degree. A tagline on the faux comic covers claims that it is ‘semi-sensationalish’. ‘Sensationalish’ is of course not a real word, its only half a word, an attempt at creating a word, a failure of a word, a semi-word.

The shocks are 90% nostalgia and tradition, like listening to Christmas carols in the month of March or rifling through boxes of Halloween paraphernalia or costumes mid-year for an out of season party or practical joke. His images depict the rotting corpses of cheerleaders play gridiron using a member of the teams dismembered head in lieu of the pigskin, in another a bat flies toward the viewer in a howling frenzy with two flick knives protruding from its chest, whilst in another picture plane anonymous and menacing figures wearing authorative hazchem suits are attacked by muscular mutants of a future toxic apocalypse in a style that pays tribute to Troma. Fail, fail, fail. Fail is cool. Again.

There are a few high brow references hidden within the imagery of the screenprints. In one small circular bordered area of a poster, prongs of a fork move in toward an open starring eye ball (see above), not unlike the infamous Dali eyeball slicing, except less professional and more punk, in the sense that the mutilation doesn’t come from a precise, determined and slow, methodic, purposeful movement using a pristine surgical scalpel, but from a presumably fast, aggressive, thrust with a common piece of cutlery that shares a likeness to the devils pitchfork.

Callahan wants to raise hell in his intricate line drawings but only to perfectly capture its shortcomings to make fun of it in the process, and, of all entrepreneurial pursuits that turn a dollar, drawing pictures of the gross and macabre seems better than most.

ON NOW- Lonely Sea- Paul McNeil

"Lonely Sea"
Paul McNeil
UNTIL NEVER Gallery
19 November- 20 December 2008

ON NOW

We've all picked up a shell, put it to our ear, and heard a simulation of ocean noise coming from within. We act out this little, clichéd performance to momentarily be alive in the moment, a free spirit, a hippy, a beach bum, for a fleeting moment, listening to sound sound of an endless ocean coming from deep within a tiny shell, we are no longer ourselves but higher beings, beach-Buddhists, free of worry or anxiety, completely at one with the sand, the shore and the universe. Unfortunately it’s a pile of fishcrap: we know its not true, but we delude ourselves for a moment because of the perceived inner peace it brings. We aren’t surf-shamans, we're escapists and malcontents searching for a deep, holier connection, but after we've taken the shell away from our ear and wiped the stupid grin from our face, we're back in the "real world", the depressing reality we know all too well. We trudge back to our hotel rooms, perhaps eat a meal in a restaurant, and give little thought to the small, saved fortune we're spending on decadent luxuries that would ordinarily be out of the question when working the 9 to 5 and catching overcrowded, poor public transport in order to make the most of every cent. We realise there’s plastic and rubbish on the beach but we only notice for the first time when the shell has been moved far enough away to not hear the impossible ocean within it anymore.

Sad but true.




McNeil taps into the spirit of the sea but not in the pseudo-truistic way already mentioned. He taps into the whoooooole thing: the ocean in the shell, the plastic rubbish strewn in the sand, the rhythm of the universe, the commercial nature of the culture, the beautiful melding of human being and mother nature, and the immature drug humour of the surfers. Psychic, cognitive eel-like tentacles reach out from McNeils consciousness, absorbing the collective mind space of surfer, jellyfish, great white, seadog, tourist, lout and barnacle alike, channelling them all at maximum volume simultaneously. As a surf-shaman McNeil also uses the power of icons and symbols, sometimes doubling or tripling their inherent visual power by combining them to form a single more powerful image (swastikas combine with anchors and marijuana leaves, another anchor has two eyes added to it so that it becomes a nose and a grin with hooked ends). Similarly he does the same with words and text: two old words create a new one, words of opposite meanings take on a new one when placed next to each other- McNeils insight to the specific and surprisingly adaptable meanings of these words comes from an intimate knowledge, use and familiarity of them.



What McNeil is NOT doing is: clinically observing and replicating for the viewer. He is very much involved in the subject matter, it’s a personal diary of pictures that tells a history, in both text and image, of danger, euphoria, materialism, land developers, great times, death, commercialism, big hits and near misses. Not all the information of all the stories and indeed the nuances they hold will be immediately accessible, but like the seashell with the impossible ocean, spend time with the work, get into lazy holiday mode, let your eyes wander slowly over the anthology and listen to the soft roar of the sea.


http://www.paulmcneil.com/

http://until-never.blogspot.com/

ON NOW- I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it- Locust Jones

“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it”
Locust Jones
Until Never Gallery
15 October- 15 November 2008

ON NOW

The gallery’s walls push forward Locust Jones work into the centre of the space. Violently. Towards the viewer. Along each wall, panels of white paper span from end to end. At first the panoramic pieces only reveal tortured black ink on thick Italian paper, the surface of which bends and warps as if its been assaulted, a result of either the physical weight of ink on the page or an after-effect of the drying process, changing the density of the affected areas surface.


This brazen attack of ink on paper is emulated in the forms created with the ink, which seem to become more recognisable and detailed the longer one looks. No more does the work appear to be an exercise in replicating monochromatic, expressive splatter paintings of the 1960's as it did when first entering the room. The vertical lines become buildings, skyscrapers, no, more like... monuments on charcoaled landscapes, burnt to the ground, precariously angled aircraft in anxious flight patterns, blackened skeletal wire bridges, men, dogs, gasmasks littering the ground. Each mark earning more respect with every passing second as more detail becomes apparent and as such becomes recognised as a deliberate process as opposed to leaving it to being a random aesthetically fortunate accident.


Looking back across the work, familiar elements that were thought to be known deliver a little more visual information than they did before and change again for the viewer: the wire bridges become rusting hulks in disrepair, the men fascist soldiers, the dogs suddenly rabid- feral, and the gasmasks become the genocidal remains: the skulls of innocent men, women and children. In this way Jones lets the viewer in on a prophetic experience, seeing through his eyes at governments falling, turbulent economies and the age-old anger man can have for his brother. Jones has only foretold to a certain point though, making the aftermath of this very real mantic vision proposedly bleak but altogether unknown.


(for additional text there is a limited supply of brochures about Locusts Jones work from a previous show, enquire with gallery staff for a copy if they are available)

Until Never Gallery:
2nd flr 3-5 Hosier Lane, (Enter from Rutledge Lane), Melbourne CBD
Gallery hours: Wednesday to Saturday 12-6pm

http://until-never.blogspot.com/

ON NOW- Take the Long Way Home- Rus Kitchin

"Take the Long Way Home"
Rus Kitchin
Until Never gallery
14 May- 14 June 2008

ON NOW

"Throw off your shackles, slaves! We are no longer servants to this history, this economy, these laws, these false idols. Wage-less servitude is over, where’s our backpay b*****'s!?!"

Overall, there is something subversively degenerate about Kitchin's "Take the Long Road Home". He doesnt make images for his work, he takes them. He doesnt pay homage to or elevate their respected status, he desecrates them. Expressionistic, visceral, paint-dripped lines, trap the image behind its suggested bars of imprisonment. Energetic, frenzied, unfamiliar icons, signs and symbols are drawn over the top of the authoritarian images of power: idols of gods, statues of holy men, photo's of shamans and instructional diagrams for life preserving procedures.

The exhibitions title work, "take the long road home", features only a few figures across the picture plane, seperated by empty space and hidden in a rain of vertical paint lines. There's a paranoia associated with the unknown figures, their identities almost knowingly obscured, in hiding amongst the bright, psychedelic, linear distortion. If only the information concealed in the lines could be read, maybe something could be gleaned in order to have an advantage in the bright but periless landscape, but these are not seperated or ordered like that of a barcode, these are frenzy-coloured, kineticly layered and dangerously unpredictable. Whatever information that could be deciphered has the potential to be fatally incorrect, making any effort quite futile.

Within the four canvases along the opposite wall, Kitchin has enslaved once powerful icons and god's of ancient cultures in the sterile unforgiving prison of the white surface. Futhermore, once entrapped they are stripped of their power and humiliated by being worked over, degraded. Their once fear inspiring image and names, forgotton and reduced to a print in a magazine or a book, and now, stolen by Kitchin for the canvas.

Kitchin has been busy indeed and will be showing in the upcoming "Graphein" curated by Peter Daverington at Lindberg Contemporary Art and Ash Keating's "2020?" a large-scale, evolving installation at the Meat Market. In the mean time however, get a glimpse at these ultra-slick, resin coated gallery works, fortunately on show for a month thanks to Until Never's generous exhibition lengths.


Until Never Gallery:

2nd flr 3-5 Hosier Lane, (Enter from Rutledge Lane), Melbourne CBD

Gallery hours: Wednesday to Saturday 12-6pm
http://until-never.blogspot.com/