The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia's next exhibition, titled South of no North (8 March to 5 May), features Australian painter Noel McKenna and two international photographers, William Eggleston and Laurence Aberhart. It's part of an ongoing series of exhibitions at the MCA placing the work of an Australian artist alongside that of international peers.
McKenna remembers first seeing Eggleston's images in the early 1980s and being struck by their focus on the commonplace - the so-called 'Democratic Camera' as termed by Eggleston. Since first seeing Aberhart's work in the early 1990s he has collected it extensively. He has also travelled with Aberhart in Northland and Southland in New Zealand. McKenna often uses photography - his own and others - as both a recording device and starting point for his paintings, capturing details of the built environment which have their own particular pathos.
The title of the exhibition stems from the places in which Aberhart and Eggleston live and work - New Zealand's North Island for Aberhart, and Memphis, Tennessee in southern United States for Eggleston. It's also the title of a book of collected short stories by the American author Charles Bukowski.
Spanning painting, ceramics, video and photography, the exhibition brings together three artists whose works are connected by an interest in the vernacular, a regional sense of place and a similar visual sensibility. All three artists create intimate scale works and use centrality in their compositions. The subject matter ranges from architecture, environments and signs to people and interiors, images captured on travels across Americaís deep south, New Zealandís North Island and Australia.
Eggleston and McKenna create colour snapshot-like images while Aberhart works in toned black and white silver gelatin contact prints.
Eggleston originally trained as a painter and is known as a pioneer of colour photography. His dye transfer prints shook the photography world and launched a photographic style called the 'Democratic Camera', the idea that anything, no matter how inconsequential, is worthy of photographing and becoming the subject of art. As a young artist in the early 1980s McKenna was struck by Eggleston's images and their focus on the commonplace.
Highlights in the exhibition include Eggleston's Untitled (Memphis) (1970), an iconic image from his early work featuring a tricycle that looms gigantically, dwarfing all around it and adopting the view of a child. McKenna taps into child-like wonder, too, through his series of paintings of 'big things' such as the Big Pineapple, Big Orange or Big Penguin - a very Australian civic obsession.
Aberhart's portrait of his daughter lying on a roof next to a ladder leading to the sky, Kamala, Lyttelton, September 1981 (1981), reflects on being a child and the swift passing of life. His gaze often falls on things in the process of disappearing, such as childhood or the built environment. McKenna first discovered Aberhartís photographs in the early 1990s.
On the work of all three artists, MCA Curator Glenn Barkley said: "They are akin to short stories where emotions and narratives are condensed into rich and provocative sensations. And while they do reflect the everyday world, they also make manifest the power of art to alert us to the wonder and poetry that is all around us."
South of no North is presented in the Level 1 South Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 140 George Street, Sydney, NSW, (ph) 02 9245 2400. Entry is free from 10am to 5pm daily, and 10am to 9pm on Thursdays. For more information see mca.com.au
Boy dressed as Batman, 1991. By Noel McKenna. (Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney).
Jook joint, Freer, Texas, 1988. Photo by Laurence Aberhart. (Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney).
Untitled (Peaches!), 1971. Photo by William Eggleston. (Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York and Eggleston Artistic Trust).
