28/05/2010
Thursday saw the opening of Chalkhorse’s latest offering There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow - Clifton Mack and Jasper Knight.
Knight’s work consists of graphic, Lichtenstein-inspired paintings on ‘found’ objects, covering a range of subjects from 1960’s America. He nails the aesthetics of the era, but does little more to engage with the history, not to mention the present.
The 1964/1965 World Fair in New York captured a moment in the lives of the generation that has defined the world we now live in. Baby Boomers, before Vietnam, the space age, and much of the civil rights movements. By ignoring this, Knight has gone too far mimicking Pop art’s flatness and avoidance of a serious subject, instead focussing on muscle cars and joy rides.
It’s too often quoted that those who neglect to acknowledge the past are doomed to repeat it, and in a sense that is what Knight is doing. Being relevant now means engaging with that history and with contemporary times, not simply regurgitating it.
Clifton Mack, ‘burdened with 60,000 years of history’ is somehow more able to be relevant now.
With traditional knowledge and techniques, Mack has adopted a more western landscape style to his work, sitting somewhere between the two.
Mack presents three works all focussing on the recently restored Jarman Island Lighthouse. The lighthouse has an ambiguous history with Roebourne and Cossack, Mack’s hometown. Roebourne’s history includes a spell as a pearling port, the venue of a gold rush, a ghost town, and currently a tourist hotspot as a part of the Pilbara region. The lighthouse has featured prominently in all of these periods, being the beacon that attracted all the ships, later to fall into disrepair with the town, and now a symbol of the town’s revitalisation.
Art, going hand in hand with culture, can act as a visual history. Mack’s gesture of including the lighthouse in his imagery has incorporated it into the Yinjibarndi people’s history, despite the ambiguous relationship that they continue to share.
Equally importantly it connects the art coming out of the Pilbara region into a dialogue with contemporary art globally. Although it contains traditional techniques, one is harder pressed to trap the work into an ideology of the exotic, or as merely craft. Yet, somehow, it was the room next door where all the crowds were gathering to marvel at the world fair.