If her house were burning down the second thing that Holly Granville-Edge would rescue would be her photographs. That is, after rescuing her family and cat. In Granville-Edge’s exhibition Throwaway she investigates what is valuable in a photograph. Whether it is a snap from a family photo album or an image seemingly insignificant or insipid, photographs have significance and prominence in art and in everyday life.

‘Photographs can carry a weight and a value far greater than the paper they’re printed on’ says Granville-Edge. Throwaway features constructed colour photographs featuring everyday objects and staged moments. Narrative and meaning do not take form in Throwaway, rather the work aims to highlight a contrast between the valued photographs and the memories they contain.

In Throwaway Granville-Edge manipulates colour, light, shadow and shape in her photographs. This manipulation of the photographic form highlights the power of the photographer in the creation and evocation of memories. Within Granville-Edge’s photographs even a ball of wool can be seen posing for a portrait and picture frame can be held in competition with the photograph it supports. words by Louise Cummins

Imprint - Growing Up Planned presents new works by a group of eight artists, architects and academics who have all shared the experience of being born or spending a period of their early childhood in Canberra during a very significant time of the city’s development.

The hesitant start to the establishment of the city through two wars and a depression meant that the most intensive period of development only began with John Overall’s appointment as commissioner of the new National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) and the adoption of the Holford Plan in 1958.

Over the next 20 years the city swelled in size to roughly its current form and it was during this time that the parents of Roger Benjamin, Tony Clark, Daniel Flood, Claire Freer, Clint Hurrell, Jonathan Nichols, Antony Moulis Bruce Reynolds and exhibition curator Virginia Rigney, were drawn to make new lives in the emerging capital and take up career opportunities in teaching, science, construction, health, retail and public administration.

Their parents were genuinely inspired by the modern ideals of the city and the opportunity to contribute to shaping its character and physical form. The chance to start afresh without the shackles to an “old” Europe still recovering from war, or the conservatism of the large colonially established Australian state capitals, was also an attraction.

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These children were to encounter freshly built modern classrooms, experimental learning styles, and had the freedom to roam in the bushland edges of the suburbs. They had a familiarity with contemporary architecture and sculpture as part of their ordinary domestic lives through visits to the local library, swimming pool, shopping centre or public park. The radial road system that so confounded tourists and new-comers was second nature and the imposing national institutions might be places where a family friend worked, or had helped to build.

Then like many of their generation, all of the participants in this exhibition, left a city that was still in many ways a small town and made their adult lives elsewhere, although all have maintained contact with the city through friends and family.
The occasion of Canberra 100 has offered the opportunity to address the city, many for the first time in their professional practice. Here they use memory like a sharp instrument to dissect into their own narratives of family life and place. This has allowed them to interrogate how their unconditioned experiences during the city’s most confident period of development continue to impact on their current practice and their works also offer insights and in some cases a critique, of the contemporary city and its place within national cultural identity. words : Virginia Rigney

This project was supported with funding made available by the ACT Government under the ACT Heritage Grants Program

Canberra Contemporary Art Space is proudly celebrating the Centenary of Canberra, an initiative of the ACT Government

image: Tony Clark Landscape with figure (2013) detail,  acrylic and permanent marker ink on one stretched canvas and 24 canvas boards 30.5cm x 610cm. Courtesy the artist

Bruce Reynolds Caprice 2 2011 Oil and acrylic paint on lino and carved wood panel 184cm x 123.5cm Courtesy the artist and Ryan Renshaw Gallery Brisbane.

Afternoon tea and talks
2-4pm Saturday 13th April 2013
CCAS Galleries
Gorman House Art Centre
55 Ainslie Avenue, Braddon
Exhibition artists Bruce Reynolds and Jonathan Nichols discuss their work in the exhibtion followed by an informal forum with Canberra residents who were pioneers of the Modern City focussing on their experience of architecture, planning and living during the 50s, 60s and 70s.

image: Bruce Reynolds Academy of Science 2009 digital print on found linoleum. Collection of Canberra Museum and Art Galley. Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Renshaw Gallery

OPENING FRIDAY 26 APRIL AT 6 PM 

Destruction, ruin and decay shock the viewer who encounters the work of Patrick Larmour. Canvases appear to have been violently torn from their frames. The boldly painted fabric flowing of frames and littering the floor and gathering in the corners are themes of Larmour’s works. The bold and bright patterns of Larmour’s canvas a deeply personal. They reflect the clothing he and his friends wear. What is troublesome is that these canvases are being so thoughtlessly damaged and discarded.

Blurring the lines between painting and sculptural forms, Larmour’s diverse works are deeply personal and highly experimental. The body and its potential illnesses and fallibility is investigated through Lamour’s constant references to clothing and medication. In doing so, Larmour forces the viewer to question the dialogue between clothing, the painting and the body. 
words : Louise Cummins

www.patricklarmour.com

 Free Seminar
Saturday 27 April 2 - 5pm
Theatrette Canberra Museum and Gallery
Civic Square Canberra City RSVP : 02 6207 3968 or cmagbookings@act.gov.au

Introduced by Virginia Rigney Senior Curator Gold Coast City Gallery and Curator Imprint Growing Up Planned and Deborah Clark Senior Curator Canberra Museum and Art Gallery
A seminar presented in conjunction with the exhibition Imprint Growing Up Planned showing at Canberra Contemporary Art Space 12 April – 18 May 2013 and the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand and the publication of a special issue of their Journal Fabrications for Canberra 100.

Speakers

Deborah Van der Plaatt
Research Fellow School of Architecture The University of Queensland; Co-editor Fabrications Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand
Aesthetics, spectacle, and ideology in the Griffins’ proposed Capitol Building.

Quentin Stevens
Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow School of Architecture and Design RMIT ; Reader in Urban Design Bartlett School of Planning University College London Visiting Research Fellow Humanities Research Centre ANU Planning Canberra’s Memorial Landscape: Death, Obscurity, and Reincarnation.

Roger Benjamin
Australian Research Council Dora Fellow 2013- 15 Dept of Art History & Film Studies Visiting Professor of Art History United States Studies Centre The University of Sydney 10 Gawler Cres Deakin A paper which examines both the lived experience and architectural history of 10 Gawler Cres Deakin, one of only two domestic heritage listed properties in Canberra.

Antony Moulis
Associate Professor Director of Research School of Architecture The University of Queensland
Gods and Monuments: Figuring Canberra’s architectural landscape

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An ominous and enveloping cloak of ash shrouds Roman Stachurki’s exhibition Second Nature. Second Nature is first in Stachurski’s pair of exhibitions that will show at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in Manuka over from 8th to the 19th of May. Concerned with the future of planet earth, this sculptural installation explores a dark and forbidding possible reality.

Stachurski says that his works reflect his interest in “the current state of the planet and civilization, particularly the consumerist culture of mankind and the modernizing world.” Themes of the terrestrial and the possibility of decay are expressed in Second Nature, which opens on Wednesday 8th May. A mixture of static and kinetic sculptures feature in an ash covered gallery space that transforms and transports the viewer into Stachurski’s own vision of the future.

Second Future, Stachurski’s second exhibition opening Wednesday 15th of May is set in a far more traditional gallery setting with plain white walls and clean floors. However, themes of a grim and frightening future persist. The influence of science fiction on both Second Nature and Second Future is evident with the artist acknowledging the influence of sci-fi author Phillip K Dick on his work. Whether or not one subscribes to such a bleak outlook of the future, it is fascinating to see how Stachurski conjures such an alarming experience of the future.
Words by Louise Cummins

SECOND NATURE
8-14 May
opening 6pm Wednesday 8 May  
a sculptural installation by Roman Stachurski 

SECOND FUTURE
15-19 May
opening 6pm Wednesday 15 May
a sculptural installation by Roaman Stachurski