Saturday, September 18, 2010

Dane Lovett: Finalist in 2010 RBS Emerging Art Prize

Chalk Horse congratulates Dane Lovett on his finalist position in the Royal Bank of Scotland Emerging Art Prize for 2010 with Twelve Years (below).

 Dane Lovett Twelve Years 2010 
Acrylic on Canvas 152 x 152cm

Dane Lovett also debuted at The Melbourne Art Fair 2010 with Chalk Horse and has exhibited extensively in Melbourne throughout 2010 including at The Metro Gallery as a part of their Art Award and also at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art as well as WESTSPACE and TCB Art Inc.
Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge
Dane Lovett feature article in RUSSH magazine, August/September 2010

Dane Lovett is represented by Chalk Horse, Sydney and is featured in a number of corporate collections including Artbank.

Snappy and Boomy (Miami)
2009 Acrylic on Aluminium 130 x 240 cm
(image courtesy: the artist, Chalk Horse and Artbank)

Friday, September 17, 2010

Jasper Knight "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" 27th May-5th June 2010


Install Shot: Jasper Knight 'There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow' 2010 
enamel and acrylic on perspex, masonite and board, 150 x 150cm

This show is the beginning of a new series for Knight that will take the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair as its subject. The title, There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, was used at the fair for a song at Progressland, an animatronic presentation for the history of electricity. The fair presented a utopian vision of modernity, from the space-age architecture of Philip Johnson to the many technological marvels. For Knight working in a contemporary, cynical age, the fair was the high point of faith and hope in the future. It was here that the American muscle car was introduced; Mack Rice recorded "Mustang Sally" in 1965. America was the shining light and undisputed centre of the world.




Install Shot: Jasper Knight 'There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow' 2010



Install Shot: Jasper Knight 'There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow' 2010

Install Shot: Jasper Knight 'There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow' 2010



A lot of themes come together for Knight in this series. The fair was the first public outing of Pop Art and begun the debate about its validity in the public consciousness. The work of Warhol commissioned by Philip Johnson in the end was actually censored and whitewashed. In hindsight though the fair was the beginning of Pop's historical legacy; Knight has often mined the experiments and formal constraints of Pop in his work.













Install Shot: Jasper Knight '1964 White Mustang' 2010
enamel and acrylic on perspex, masonite and board, 90 x 120cm




The architecture of the fair also fits well to Knight's broader practice. Some of Knight's most successful works have been his industrial landscape: wharves, cranes, bollards, and columns. What drives these works is a process of declassing or morphing, where Knight takes the strong and solid and turns it into liquid and soft. This process can be seen clearly in Stained Glass Support System. The wharves work so well because sometimes the bollards become more liquid than the harbour itself or subtly shift between the two states water/ground, bollard/liquid. Knight’s actual surfaces also partake in this lowering and destablising; the strong gridded, industrial ground becomes layered, erased and more organic.






Install Shot: Jasper Knight 'Futurama' 2010
enamel and acrylic on perspex, masonite and board, 90 x 120cm




The New York Fair is now also declassed. It is a ruin, a marker of a past moment or an architectural artefact. Beside the volunteer efforts of architecture students the Flushing Meadows site is a now forgotten remnant of a lost American dream. Used famously in Men in Black and now Iron Man 2, it represents something, something a little out of the ordinary and idiosyncratic, but it has lost its power to imagine a perfect future for our united post war world. Knight for his part equivocates. The work is hopeful and free, like a modernist, gestural dream. It is also nostalgic and yearning for a past that may not return.




Install Shot: Jasper Knight 'Red Mustang' 2010
enamel and acrylic on perspex, masonite and board, 120 x 120cm

Text by Oliver Watts, 2010

David Thomson 'Models' 3rd-18th September 2010

“What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: as if what speaks, what is significant is always abnormal… The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us… This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.”

- Georges Perec, ‘The Infra-Ordinary’, 1973


Bottle 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable


Stockings 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable

Red Belt 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable

Candlestick 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Straw 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm



Dog 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Double Beam 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Egg Cup 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Goggles 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Pitter 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Shuttlecock 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm


Sponge 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm


Buckets 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Clip 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Holder 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Loop 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Rings 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Scourer 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Wool 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Egg Feet 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Egg Head 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Tray 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Vase 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm

Rubick's Cube 2010 Single edition digital photograph 30.5 x 45.5 cm