Pictured below are a few shapshots taken during and after the Modern Myth floor talks last Saturday
afternoon, February 13, at Counihan Gallery In Brunswick. All photos are by Shane Jones.
After a brief introduction, exhibition curator Domenica Vavala conducted an interview via Skype with Modern Myth artist Carmel Seymour in Iceland. I spoke directly afterwards, followed by Eddy Carroll, Annette Phillips, Linda Studena, Domenica Vavala and finally, Jazmina Cininas. Jazmina spoke of her sculptures, the lagerphones that evolved from her Lithuanian heritage and double as musical instruments for the group The Lost Clog, of which she is a member. This was a perfect cue for one of the afternoon’s delights, a short song cycle by that very group.
Afterwards, in a local cafe, Shane and I reunited with two old friends who had traveled considerable distances to attend the floor talks (See last photo). Bev Murray (who I've known since my days in London in the 1970s) barely had time to shed her jet lag after arriving from London on Monday, and Kim McDonald (who I met when we were art school undergraduates in the 1980s) had journeyed from Fish Creek in regional Victoria.
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| Domenica Vavala's Skype interview with Carmel Seymour in Iceland |
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| Far right: works by Dear Plastic |
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| Eddy Carroll (background, second from right) discusses her Shadow Self Shadow. Foreground right: works by Dear Plastic |
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Dominica Vavala (second from right) speaks about her watercolours and the ideas that underpin them.
Also in this shot, right: Annette Phillips's sculpture based on the myth of Narcissus
and Eddy Carroll's Self Shadow Self |
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| The Lost Clog's traditional pre-performance lubrication of the vocal chords |
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| The Lost Clog, featuring Jazmina Cininas (centre) |
For an overview of each artist’s work and the ideas underlying
MODERN MYTH, Jazmina’s wonderful opening night address is reproduced below.
Less than a fortnight ago, The Guardian
newspaper ran an article proposing that fairytales have been part of human
culture since the Bronze Age. It seems our need for tales of good and evil, of
punishment and reward, of transformation and redemption, is as old as humanity
itself, stretching back to ancient ages and long dead tongues. We may no longer
believe in the veracity of capricious gods or enchanted lands ruled by magic
and giants and yet, the myths of our past continue to demand our attention and
fascination, reinvented and regurgitated in recurring symbolic themes. Peruse the highest grossing films of all time and you will find an
overrepresentation of fantasy and the fantastical in our popular entertainment,
manifesting in the alien universes of Star Wars and Avatar, the magical dining
halls and dungeons of Harry Potter, the super powers and superheroes and
villains of a Marvel comic brought to life, or – as any parent of a
primary-school-aged daughter will tell you, the sub zero sisterhood of Elsa and
Anna.
In her collection of essays, Six Myths of our
Time, the English mythographer Marina Warner writes:
“We're living in a new age of faith of sorts, of
myth-making, of monsters and chimaeras.
The fictions and narratives of a society
contribute as fundamentally to its character as its laws and economy and
political arrangements... Myths offer a lens which can be used to see human
identity in its social and cultural context ...[They] convey values and
expectations which are always evolving, in the process of being formed, but
...never set so hard they cannot be changed again; newly told stories can be
more helpful than repeating old ones.”
So,
with that in mind...
Once
upon a time, in the fabled hamlet of Brunswick, the benevolent curator Domenica
of Vavala gathered a cast of storytellers within the walls of Castle Counihan. Naturally,
these were no ordinary tellers of tales. In place of words or manuscripts, these
new minstrels of mythmaking wove their tales with colours and symbols, with shimmering
artefacts and flickering projections.
Eleven made
up their number; a cricket team of visual raconteurs, or a soccer side of pictorial
storytellers, if you prefer. A slippery number, the “blazon of sin” according
to Saint Augustine, the number of internal conflict and rebellion, of
exaggeration and extravagance. The number of days that simply disappeared in 1752 when Britain switched to the
Gregorian calendar, and Wednesday 2nd September was followed by
Thursday 14th September.
Rumour has it
that at first, there were only ten when, at the eleventh hour, the eleventh
member entered their midst, hopefully not entirely reminiscent of the forgotten
fairy whom everyone thought dead until she burst uninvited into a royal
christening bringing a curse of sleep upon the kingdom.
Or that the
ten were never really ten to begin with, for how does one properly count the
two-headed Takahashi, who prefer their correspondence addressed Dear Plastic? In
the Modern Myth, there are no absolutes, and nothing is what it first seems. But
on with the story.
Conventional
wisdom tells us that the beginning is a very good place to start, so very well,
let’s begin at the beginning. Alesh
Macak’s personal Tardis takes us back before Once upon
a time, before the Bronze Age even, to a time before time. In Vignettes of a
Forgotten Time, Castle Counihan’s resident Time Lord has charted a course from
the heart of the earth’s forests to edge of universe. To where supernovas give birth to new planets with twin suns and
kaleidoscopic clouds. To the first breath of the oceans and primordial
quivering of the forests. To the very beginning - and the very end - of time
Joining Alesh
at the dawn of creation are Dear Plastic. Like the Shinto gods Izanagi and Izanami giving birth
to the Japanese archipelago, Yumi and Masahiro conjure up
new lands filled with sunshine and possibility, inviting us
through rainbow gateways into candy-coloured vignettes of happiness, where clouds
the colour of fairy floss form crowns for innocents and optimists.
If we follow in
shadow of Joseph Campbell, beginnings give way to adventures in which the known
and the familiar are abandoned for the unknown, whether this be:
“a forest, a kingdom
underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty
mountaintop, or profound dream state; but … always a place of strangely fluid
and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and
impossible delight.”
Heeding
the call, watercolour fabulist Domenica Vavala, scales the peaks of Mount Llullaillaco
on the Argentinian border, passing through willow patterned landscapes to lost
lands where half a millennium ago, fifteen year old Sun Virgins drank eternal
sleeping potions of coca leaves and maize beer so that crops might flourish and
the weather be kind, their perfectly preserved bodies resurrected 500 years
later, like Incan Sleeping Beauties.
The arctic
fogs of Canada and Reykjavik still cling to Carmel Seymour’s watercolours and
works on paper. Her intrepid travellers navigate snow-blind landscapes and
tripping hazards armed only with woollen coats, outstretched hands and trust. Or they
may embark on pilgrimages to improbable mountaintops where gravity makes way
for levitating rocks, and radiant force fields rival the splendour and palette
of the Northern Lights.
My own ancestral
pilgrimage has transported me to the animist forests of pagan Lithuania, where
a lingering whiff of the brewery offers a conduit between Baltic and Antipodean
folk traditions, and birds and beasts do battle on the dance floor in shimmering,
armoured feathers and fur.
The rules of monomythic
tradition entitle the hero – or heroine – to at least one supernatural guardian
with the power to bestow a talisman, enchantment or knowledge, enabling one to
overcome the dragons and lesser monsters one is bound to meet along the quest.
Minela Krupić takes on the
mantle of fairy godmother, preserving histories and visualising new futures for
the latest wave of refugees overwhelmed by the challenges of a new language and
culture, her empathy born of her own exile from war-torn Bosnia Herzegovina and
her earliest encounters and cultural collisions with Australia.
Eddy Carrol’s frayed amulet of
satin chains and bridal tulle - suspended like unrequited longing - harnesses
the counsel of Xhaansi costumiers, while a sequinned shadow hints at Mespotamian
meditations and mysteries. Like a genie released from a lamp, Shadow self Shadow simultaneously
promises eternal glamour yet appears as elusive and ephemeral as smoke released into abandoned
opium dens.
Paul Compton prefers the cravats,
black taffeta and heavy velvets of Victorian boudoirs, harnessing the happenstance
of collage and consorting with fortune-tellers and gaslight spiritualists to
create his personalised tarot deck. This major arcana inevitably predicts
calamity and catastrophe, but always offers just enough optimism, and good
humour, to enable one to piece the shattered fragments of the self back
together again, if not necessarily in the same order.
For where is mythology
without a good dose of metamorphosis, whether the transformation be a
revelation, a liberation, or a punishment, a curse? Annette
Phillips plumbs the beauty myths of classical Greece, resurrecting the
cautionary legend of Narcissus, adding a Midas touch in which foraged refuse
from local tips, nature strips and op shops is transformed
into exuberant, colour saturated sculpture.
Deborah Klein’s beetle
women might equally be the victims of their own vanities, cursed to lives as nature’s
jewels and ornaments, or captured and displayed as trophies by entomological
Bluebeards. Or perhaps the jewelled wings are the very things that allow these
women to escape their ivory towers and domestic prisons, the stingers a welcome
substitute for darning needles.
Recalling the story of the brave
little tailor, Linda Studená reveals the hierarchies of fiction within myth
making by squeezing water, or more accurately tears, from stone, and exposing
the vanities and exaggerations on which nationhood is built. Glimpsed in a blur
from a moving car, Prague’s four monuments to Czech cultural tradition, the
heroic Myslbek statues, have been usurped by Kleenex tissues and ephemerality. Three
of the statues may glorify verified heroes and heroines from the annals of
Czech mythology, however the fourth couple, warriors Záboj and Slávoj, miraculously materialised
- like an Ern Malley poem - in the nineteenth century, begging the question: is
a hoax more, or less, mythical than a myth?
In an age when webs are spun in cyberspace, just when does a false rumour, a
traveller’s tale, a parable, a decommissioned religious belief, an urban
legend, an old wives’ tale, the sworn testament of a friend of a friend, enter
the sanctioned lexicon of a nation’s mythos? Our footwear may have changed, but
it seems that humankind is eternally embarking on a perpetual quest for the new
myths of their time, often retracing the steps of our past in order to more
fully comprehend our present, and increase our chances of a happily ever after.
And
so, in a month of inconstant days - the only month in which one might not see a
single full moon - in a year with too many days, in the topsy turvy land where
summer takes place in winter and swans are black instead of white, on behalf of
the eleven artists who might really be twelve, I invite you to uncover your own
heroes and heroines, and to take your own steps towards the Modern Myth.
The
End
© Jazmina Cininas, 2016
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A floor talk is thirsty work. Re-lubricating my own vocal cords in a Coburg cafe after the event.
Left-right: Bev Murray, Shane Jones (reflected in the mirror) myself and Kim McDonald |
