| The snow
has long melted and Graeve has worked hard in his temporary
studio. His creative work was squeezed between three other jobs
in Melbourne; in New York he has revelled in the luxury of total
concentration. Now a sound installation and a group of his paintings
feature in Your Sky, an Australian group show opening on Thursday hosted by a
small but funky Tribeca gallery ironically called Gigantic Artspace
(GAS).
The
gallery's director, Lea Rekow, is from Bundaberg and has lived
in New York for eight years. She opened the gallery in December
2003 to represent multi-disciplinary artforms, rather than "just
putting paintings on the walls".
The gallery
has just hosted a solo show for Edwina White, a University of
Technology, Sydney, graduate now living in Brooklyn. Your Sky features six Australian artists
who have worked, or are working, in New York: Graeve and his
wife Elissa Sadgrove, Justine Cooper, Louisa Bufardeci, Jessica
Rankin and Judith Wright.
GAS's
flurry of antipodean activity is a coincidence, says Rekow.
"I actually try to play down the Australian thing because
to me to identify someone by their nationality is really lame."
In New York, where everybody is from somewhere else, she says,
"the whole idea of promoting someone that way doesn't really
hold water".
But she
thinks Australian artists deserve as much support as anyone
else. Not that Australian art doesn't have a profile here -
indigenous contemporary art has been hot for some time.
Cooper,
born in Sydney, has divided her life between Australia and the
US; her last move was to New York in 2000. In Australia, she
is known as a new media artist who experiments with medical
technology including magnetic resonance imaging.
The work
in Your
Sky
involves more traditional photography - she was the American
Museum of Natural History's first artist in residence, poking
through backroom collections and taking photos with a vintage
camera to explore scientific desire and why humans collect.
"I could have looked in people's closets and done the same
kind of project," she says.
But had
she done so she might not have found rows of stuffed circus
seals, lockers full of leopard pelts or trays of yellow honeyeaters
from Queensland. The leopards and birds were nearly censored
from her solo exhibition - the museum was concerned how these
macabre-looking specimens, relics of another era of collecting,
might reflect on the modern institution. Cooper argued them
back in.
She misses
the openness of Australian institutions, so crucial for the
medical and scientific nature of her artwork. "In the States
it's so much more commercial. To get the same level of access
is really hard."
But what
Cooper finds hardest is the pressure from the commercial art
world in New York "to do a particular kind of thing".
"They want you to be the artist who makes things out of
string or who only photographs animals," she says. Her
next project will focus on pharmaceutical marketing. "That
makes me harder to categorise."
For Graeve,
it's been enough to attract some interest in New York before
he heads to Chicago on a scholarship. "I've only ever had
one curator studio visit in Australia over 10 years and I've
had maybe 30 or so in five months in New York."
While
New York's international arts scene is undeniably more influential
than Melbourne's, Graeve says Australian arts funding is better
and there's more support from initiatives such as artist-run
spaces. Going home is not hard, he says; it's finding the finances
to maintain links in New York. He hopes Your Sky leads to a relationship with GAS
and a New York connection.
But whatever
happens, he says, "it's been a period of growth and consolidation
that will nourish". |
