View of Mt Kembla from Gleniffer Brae (Before and after Eugene Von Guérard) 2022
One of the most celebrated works in the collection of the Wollongong Art Gallery is Eugene Von Guérard’s painting Cabbage tree forest, American Creek, New South Wales which features a composited view of a compressed Mt Kembla through a grove of Cabbage tree palms. The scene is composed from various separate viewpoints that von Guérard coheres into a confabulated landscape with distinct foreground, middle ground and background components a historic and contemporary model I have also used here in View of Mt Kembla from Gleniffer Brae (Before and after Eugene Von Guérard), the first in a new body of direct to metal unique state prints. In these new work’s the underlying photograph is distinctly visible through the images upper surface layer as a way of acknowledging that in the first instance landscape is an effacement of country. As a process it is a reverse engineering of Pentimento where a visible trace of an earlier painting begins to assert itself through the strata of overpainting.
View of Mt Kembla from Gleniffer Brae (Before and after Eugene Von Guérard), takes a view of Mt Kembla from a location similar to that used by Von Guérard and compresses it so that it closely resembles the distorted profile of Mt Kembla in Von Guérard’s 1860 painting,
A spectacular Illawarra Flame tree observed on Mt Kirra road which was planted by the descendants of the house’s current occupants three generations ago occupies the position and substitutes for the vertical Cabbage Tree palms in the Wollongong Art Gallery’s Von Guérard. The foreground are some of the original Paul Sorenson landscaping design elements from the garden at Glennifer Brae.
View of Mt Kembla from Gleniffer Brae (Before and after Eugene Von Guérard), is displayed opposite a Qing dynasty provincial lattice-backed hardwood cabinet from which the 2 lattice backed elements have been removed. The excision of the cabinet’s back relocates it culturally and temporally. Among the diverse objects from the Mann-Tatlow Collection displayed on its shelves is a Neolithic earthenware pot with red painted decoration (circa 2,500 BC) from Northeast Thailand. The pattern and shape of the jar links it to similar Neolithic objects from the Mediterranean among the many ways the ArtHitects cite global cultural discourses not originating wholly in the West.
View of Mt Kembla from Gleniffer Brae (Before and after Eugene Von Guérard), takes its distinctive laser cut profile from that of the Neolithic painted jar displayed opposite in an intentionally direct dialogue. The scale of this double layered image allows it to function as one of several optical portals inserted into The Illawarra Pavilion’s architecture.By seamlessly overlaying a high gloss curvilinear shape on top of a rectangular window in which the same image is not only matt but realised in a different print media the ArtHitects enact their understanding of the harmonious concurrence of difference and sameness within art and life.