No Easy Answers

Based in Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, ACT, Ella Barclay explored the complex yet universal experience of living in a networked world. In Dense Bodies and Unknown Systems, we peered into tanks of bubbling mist to see numerous round bodies swimming across brightly coloured and tempestuous oceans. The work was about the experience of navigating systems that are increasingly automated and unfamiliar and explores the very form that information takes - a substance that was at once mesmerising, ungraspable and flickering between all of us constantly.

To create the work, Barclay worked with a drone pilot to film herself swimming across an Olympic diving pool. She has then used generative compositing technologies and hand-built electronics to create what looks like three humming, strange computer servers filled with lofty visions. Dense Bodies and Unknown Systems queered our understanding of information technology as masculine, entrepreneurial and corporate. Here, it was celebrated as non-masculine, gothic, messy and uncanny.

Enhanced Entanglements was a series of brightly coloured abstract photographs that appeared to be set in space or another dimension. Whilst they initially seemed like impossible graphics rendered in a supercomputer, they are in fact just photographs of an installation the artist had made in her studio with a jumble of silicon light cables and some melted black plastic.

The work invited us to consider the virtual spaces we are creating with each new innovation in immersive media and artificial intelligence. Were these the faces of new alien creatures coming to meet us or just apparitional reflections of ourselves?

Ella Barclay is an artist whose practice is deeply rooted in feminist histories of technology and the social contexts in which technologies are made.

Listen to Ella Barclay and her installations in No Easy Answers with curator Bree Pickering.

These paintings began as a stopgap at the beginning of the pandemic, not being a painter, even in the pandemic pause, I felt the need to create an excuse to cosplay as a painter. Latching onto a book that I was reading which partially examines a phenomenon in post-1960s left wing thinking labelled ‘Folk Politics’, I decided this catchy, derisive moniker was a suitable hook to hang my newly minted painter's hat on.

I liked that this broader historic examination of the left and its actual/perceived failure to counter neoliberalism finds a neat micro version of itself in the contemporary left - like looking through a telescope backwards. To focus upon local over large-view and also, remain attendant to a broad swath of identity-based hierarchies of oppression, at once, for me spoke to our endlessly connected and shuttered pandemic world. Plus, I like a call to collective action and as mentioned, I love the moniker, Folk Politics!

Anyway, it turns out painting is incredibly enjoyable, albeit prone to deliver some harsh realities to the non-painter and their diminished capacities. Paintings can seem resolved, even kind-of-good, then, a week later proudly announce your failure. I bumbled through a variety of mediums, styles, surfacesand approaches. The one thing I'd learnt from the capital ‘P’ Painters I know was that when it doesn't work, wipe, sand, or scrape the thing back and start over. However, as just a painter, I chose the opposite. Obliterating my paintings with a single colour, collaging, piling on anything at hand - in the midst of renovating our house, invariably insulation adhesive, concrete, aluminium flashing, and old house keys amongst other matter entered the works. It seemed apt to spout Folk Politics from a decidedly collective ground. Though not all are so crass, occasionally there's a lighter touch and in many the moniker is eschewed all together. As ever, the differences make the collective stronger.

- Christopher Hanrahan, email to Bree Pickering, 20 January 2023

Christopher Hanrahan was born in 1978 in Mudgee, Australia and currently lives and works in New York, USA. To date, his conceptual, predominantly sculptural practice has made use of reduction, absence, slackening, language, and light to loosen ostensibly fixed forms and practices, opening them to new interpretations.

Hanrahan was the recipient of a 2015 Australia Council Greene Street Residency, a 2013 New Work Grant, and a 2013 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally.

Check out this interview with Christopher Harahan discussing Folk Politics in No Easy Answers.

For me, walking is an act of learning, a cultural exchange with the land and those I am with.

The Greater Blue Mountains Area, which I call home, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000, for its outstanding diversity of nearly 100 kinds of Eucalyptus trees and close to pristine wilderness. The Eucalyptus trees here, connect us all with every breath.

At the heart of this, is the Blue Gum Forest on Dharug Country, in the Grose Valley.

This portrait of the Blue Gum Forest, contemplates an ancient place that inspired a modern conservation movement, leading to the eventual reservation of the million-hectare Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.

Following extensive research conversations with local custodians including First Nations cultural educators, ecologists, historians, and National Parks personnel, I descended and ascended over 50,000 steps into the rugged Grose Valley wilderness with fellow cinematographer Craig Bender, exploring the Blue Gum Forest and the impacts of the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires which burnt 71% of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.

Coming to know a forest through walking, is an exploration of intergenerational relationships, knowledge and questions of custodianship. Now transformed after fire and flood, the Blue Gum Forest is in concurrent stages of martyrdom and regeneration. The 70-metre-tall Eucalyptus deanei are estimated to be up to 1200 years old, but the reproductive capacity of the Blue Gum Forest from this point is unknown.

-Vera Hong

Check out this interview with Vera Hong discussing Let Me Pass Onto You in No Easy Answers.

In all the photo series I create, narratives happen, but they are always twisted narratives. In reality, the story lines are very simple. I work in clichés…The reading’s got to come from the viewer. The minute I say what the narrative is, I really believe it’s the end of an artwork. I never say what it is.

- Tracey Moffatt interview with Coco Fusco, BOMB Magazine, 1 July 1998

Moffatt’s Laudanum took over a year to make. The 19 images were photogravures; an imaging making process popular during the turn of the twentieth century, where a photograph is used to create an etched plate from which very fine images can be printed. The works presented a psychosexual drama between two protagonists: mistress and servant. Set in a colonial mansion and titled after an opioid drug widely prescribed to treat ‘female disorders’ in the 1800s, Laudanum presents relations of power, pain, and pleasure in a fantasy/nightmare/dreamscape. The work was also often described as implying the dynamics between colonised and coloniser.

In an interview with artist Coco Fusco while she was making Laudanum, Moffatt pointed to her influences and processes at the time: the history of photography, photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Annie Brigman, Southern American writer Carson McCullers whose American landscapes reminded Moffatt of the Queensland she grew up in; ‘a very beautiful place, but also very redneck; a kind of paradise to grow up in, but you can’t wait to get the hell out.’ Moffatt spoke of ‘the landscape of the face’ of working-class people, and how her memory and imagination interplay with her practice as an artist.

For Moffatt, each image was expected to be able to stand on its own, outside of its place in the series. She is a precise director who storyboards her work and casts ordinary people instead of actors or models. Presented in full, Laudanum showed the gothic tendency in Moffatt’s work. It spoke directly to the subconscious and the powerful potential of images made by artists.

Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s most renowned contemporary artists. Working predominantly in photography, film and video, Moffatt is known as a powerful visual storyteller. The narrative is often implied and self-referential, exploring her own childhood memories, and the broader issues of race, gender, sexuality and identity.

Moffatt has held over 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States and Australia. Her films, including Nightcries – A Rural Tragedy (1989), and beDevil (1993), have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York and the National Centre for Photography in Paris.

Her most recent work, titled A Haunting, is a site-specific installation situated inside a small, dark farmhouse off the Castlereagh Highway in rural New South Wales. The dilapidated 1920s built house sits on confiscated lands of the Wailwan peoples and other nearby language groups. It radiates a pulsing red light, bringing to light the bloody history of Colonial settlement and of Indigenous skirmishes with pastoralists.

Physical Foyer by Vitche-Boul Ra was commissioned for the opening of No Easy Answers and was presented in two parts. The first was performed outside the Museum building with only casual onlookers as audience members. The second part involved a procession through the Museum’s gallery spaces and walkways, leading to a ceremony on Ra’s purpose-built stage installation.

For an edited version of Physical Foyer produced by Jacqueline Schulz, click here.

Vitche-Boul Ra is a Transhumanist Folk-Theurgist with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts (Sculpture concentration) from The University of the Arts. To develop a physicalized performance practice adjacent to western sculpture, It also studied dance in the UArts School of Dance directed by Donna Faye Burchfield. In Philadelphia, It has shown solo (+collaborative) works at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vox Populi gallery, Little Berlin gallery, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery. In New York, Ra performed in Fridman Gallery’s 5th Anniversary Festival and was curated into the Center for Performance Research’s Spring Movement Festival 2018 as well as the New Dance Alliance's 2019 Performance Mix Festival: 33. In 2021 It has collaboratively worked alongside Moor Mother (Goddess) showing at Pace Gallery (NY), CalArts REDCAT (LA), and The Kitchen (NY).

Check out this interview with Vitche-Boul Ra discussing it's performance in No Easy Answers.

My work stems from a dissatisfaction with the history of bronze in public spaces, and an attempt to imagine a future where bronze is not so compromised by its own history. New relationships to materials are required for a comprehensive restructuring of our sociality that might be able to excise white supremacy.

­­- Wilmer Wilson IV, 2021

Presented as part of No Easy Answers, Wilson’s works ‘til bronze flows through the streets and The Groaning Studies were made two years apart across a period of social and political upheaval in the United States. Both works reflect Wilson’s wider concern with “the way blackness is shaped in and by city space”.

‘til bronze flows through the streets was originally presented in late 2020 as billboards in public spaces in Richmond, Virginia where Wilson was born. It responded to the persistent presence of Confederate monuments with a call to go beyond simply removing the monuments from public view (a highly visible act that nevertheless ensures their continued existence). Wilson instead proposes transforming the oppressive history of bronze into new forms, reflecting the effort required to end the status quo of systemic racism. The billboards were on view during the 2020 US Presidential Election and positioned public art as means to encourage civic participation.

The Groaning Studies came two years into Wilson’s work with bronze. The concrete and bronze are new monuments that reorganise the materials of public space into new forms. This work were made concurrent to Wilson’s development of a major bronze work that will be installed in public space in Philadelphia later in 2023.

Wilmer Wilson IV (b. 1989, Richmond, VA) makes speculative combinations of archival material and everyday objects which probe the cracks of humanistic embodiment. The resulting compositions are multidisciplinary, often incorporating photography, sculpture, performance, and writing. Wilson’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the New Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; In Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham; Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia; and others. In 2017 he was awarded a Pew Fellowship. Wilson received his MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA in Photography at Howard University. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.