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© Kawita Vatanajyankur The Scale of Justice, 2016 [digital video still].
Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney.

Kawita Vatanajyankur » Machinized

Emmaline Zanelli » Please Touch

David Collins » Pony

June 25 – July 23, 2016

Stills Gallery

36 Gosbell Street . Paddington NSW 2021
Sydney - Australia
T +61 2-93317775
info@stillsgallery.com.au
www.stillsgallery.com.au
Wed-Sat 11am-5pm

Kawita Vatanajyankur » Machinized

June 25 – July 23, 2016

In Machinized, Kawita Vatanajyankur is a tool, a moving part in the machine. She transforms herself into food production equipment in performance videos that restage processes such as boxing eggs and weighing leafy greens. Like her previously celebrated works, this new series is graphic and glorious, sharing the same eye-catching allure that enamours us to ads. The confronting nature of her endurance performances, however, interrupts this seductive surface.

The repetitive and arduous tasks that Vatanajyankur performs parody a pervasive slippage between human and machine, and foreground the forgotten body within a technologically accelerating world. Beyond this literal translation, these gestures also make visible the invisible mechanisms that govern women’s everyday labour in her birthplace of Thailand. In both contexts, paring seduction and confrontation proves a powerful device in Vatanajyankur’s hands—a Trojan horse for tackling entrenched attitudes toward gender, equality and work.

In The Scale of Justice (2016), for instance, the artist becomes a traditional ‘beam scale’, balancing hanging baskets from her arms and feet. Against the jewel-coloured backdrop of sapphire pink, the baskets fill up and overflow with luscious green veg while we watch as her balance and composure are increasingly tested, her corporeal and psychological limits measured. Vatanajyankur’s self-deprecating humour is also seductive. In Egg Holder (2016) she even invites her face to be egged. Aiming to catch them in her mouth in this ill-fated feat, her yoke-covered face is displayed over half a dozen screens.

These performances are slapstick, colourful and absurd: bells and whistles to disguise careful choreography, extraordinary skill and acute social critique. By maintaining a ‘happy smile’ while pushing herself to extremes, she pays testament to female grace and resilience in the face of injustice and invisibility. Amid the pretty colours of fresh food, however, this feminine fortitude is also presented as poignant and complex. It is an unpalatable reminder of the self-inflicted violence—of body and mind—that comes with our compliance to certain social norms.

Vatanajyankur’s deliberate self-objectification suggests that our bodies are a medium for submission but also for resistance. This brave, beautiful and playful work frees her from a culture of compliance but also from her mind. As she explains, it turns her body into sculpture.

Kawita Vatanajyankur graduated in Fine Art from RMIT University in 2011. Receiving critical acclaim early in her career, her work has featured in national and international exhibitions including, Thailand Eye, Saatchi Gallery, London & Bangkok Art & Cultural Centre (2015-2016); Video oediV, Campbelltown Arts Centre (2016); Cornucopia, Shepparton Art Museum (2016); Finalist, Jaguar Asia Tech Art Prize, Art Taipei, Taiwan; PROXIMITY, National Museum, Poland (2014); The Encyclopedic Palace: Melbourne Offsite for the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); BorderBody, MECA, Spain & Gallery MD_S, Poland (2013); Ikono On Air Festival, Germany (2013); and Channels Festival, Melbourne (2013). Australian Art Collector featured her work on the cover.

Emmaline Zanelli » Please Touch

25 June – 23 July, 2016

Emmaline Zanelli is an emerging artist from Adelaide whose practice explores absurdity and sensuality in human interactions. She uses an experimental approach to image making in which sculpture, photography and performance are messed with, merged and layered.

In Please Touch, Zanelli plays with ideas of privacy, power, connection and sexuality. In mundane domestic settings she covers herself with enlarged images of her own skin that she has printed onto papers and fabrics. In these small performances her actual body is substituted with its own image, an act that explores the photograph itself - the space it represents and the physical space it occupies.

In Weak Spot, for instance, Zanelli’s foot tentatively reaches toward a computer mouse from underneath a shroud that is printed with an orifice—perhaps a belly button? Her disembodied flesh is echoed by a cow skin rug, which provides a surrogate skin for the tiled floor. In Hypersensitive she levitates in a corner, her body largely hidden behind a follicle-covered print. The lurid green of crumpled paper beneath her creates an improvised indoor garden in which a freestanding, over-sized bitter melon suggestively points in her direction.

With their enlarged pores and stubby hairs, these works are comical, sensuous and slightly disturbing. They heighten our awareness for how photography shapes our response toward its subject, especially when it comes to the objectification of the female body. Fragility is suggested in these performances and the titles of the works, but is also subverted with humour. In a time when our human interactions and our experiences of images are increasingly immaterial, Please Touch offers a playful and disquieting exploration of the relationship between the photograph and the body.

Zanelli has been actively exhibiting around Adelaide since 2010. During the 2015 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival she was awarded the Centre for Creative Photography Latent Image Award, and was also invited to give a presentation about her work as part of the Artist's Voice forum weekend at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She was selected for the 2016 Helpmann Academy South Australian Graduate Exhibition where she was selected as the inaugural winner of the Helpmann Academy Watson Award. In May this year, Zanelli’s work was included in the 2016 HATCHED National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts as one of the top 34 Visual Arts graduates in Australia. She is working towards a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia’s (CASCA)’s project space in 2017.

David Collins » Pony

25 June to 23 July 2016

Pony presents three recent performative video works by David Collins in which he engages horses in acts of control and surrender. Describing these exercises as “human-animal collaborations”, Collins sees them as analogies for psychological struggles and power relationships.

In Riptide (2016), for instance, artist and horse meet in a subtle but stubborn confrontation: Collins pushes the horse, the horse pushes back. Dwarfed against the animal’s size and strength, the artist’s hand is commanding, but also comforting and revering. Flesh and fur fills the screen as power transfers between the two. In this physical exchange, mutual respect and familiarity are palpable thanks to the artist’s upbringing on a farm with horses in Perth. But, in these videos, horses hold more than sentimental significance, they are metaphors for the sublime—the universal experience that mixes fear with wonder.

These emotions are discernible in Jett Rink, (2015-2016), despite the fact that both artist and horse are, at points, barely visible. Unclothed but covered in thick and glossy molasses, the artist is licked by a black horse, its fur and eyes also gleaming. This is an act of surrender for Collins, who is near-blinded by the dense and dripping substance. Visual details reveal themselves and disappear within the black screen, producing a dark psychological space. In it, threat transitions to trust and a profound, non-linguistic understanding.

There is something sci-fi and cinematic about Collins’ shining black shell, which looks more metallic than organic. Drama and emotion are also heightened through slow motion and high production values, filmic qualities that each of the works share. I Wish I Were Your Hero (2015), for instance, draws directly on the history of cowboy Westerns, recreating the cliché image of brave hero aback a bucking horse. In this version, however, the artist is dressed in modern day street-wear and the motif repeats on loop. Idealised fictions reach from the past into the future it suggests, sampled and recycled within our present through a collective imagination and personal desires.

In these videos, the powerful and intelligent ponies perform as actors with equal command of the screen. Through their symbolic presence, popular culture and spiritual ritualism appear not as opposites, but as interconnected elements of our social and psychic lives. Together they speak to a human compulsion for catharsis, Collins proposes, the need for emotional release.

David Collins was born in Perth, Western Australia. Specializing in photography and video media at Curtin University, he graduated with First Class Honors in 2010. His work has been presented in solo exhibition at Perth Centre for Photography, Jarvis Dooney (Berlin) and Fehily Contemporary (VIC), and he has participated in group exhibitions such as the Pingyao Photography Festival (China). His work has been reviewed in Australian Art Collector Magazine, Art Guide Australia, Scoop magazine and The Age. His work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery Of Western Australia, and the University Of Western Australia’s Lawrence Wilson Gallery.

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