For Melbourne Art Fair 2020 online viewing room, The Commercial presents sculptures by Bonita Bub, a wall drawing and the latest release of her POWERPOINTS Catalogue subscription by Agatha Gothe-Snape and new paintings by Jude Rae.
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Jude Rae's observational painting practice is analytic of objects, space and light. Her work is as much concerned with the generative energy around things and the relationships adhering between them as the things themselves. Rae is most well-known for still life painting. She works the conceptual and perceptual propositions this traditional genre offers as within a laboratory, subtly manipulating the variables of composition and the desires of media.
The passive psychology and active energetic fields of her inanimate compositions permit the viewer to cross the threshold—overtly depicted—of pictorial space into an experiential matrix that is contemplative and unselfconscious. Regardless, the painting as a material object, its proof of life, is always evident in its abstractions, in paint's attenuation across the slub of woven linen and the pout of white primer and Burnt Sienna imprimatura appearing around the wrapped volume of the painting's support.
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Bonita Bub produces sculptures that are elevated replicas of industrial equipment and furniture in materials and with processes upgraded and more highly-refined than their expressly functional, mass-produced prototypes. Her selection of and heightened improvements to found design are part of a subtle conversation between form, function and minimalist aesthetics in which she draws extensively on her own technical skill and labour.
Bub's Painting Carriers, with their elegant and complex geometries and industrial palette, blur the boundaries of aesthetics and function. The striking Blaize Blue powder-coatings of this series of sculptures with their popping pink high-viz castors point towards the artist's painting background.
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Agatha Gothe-Snape's wall drawing, Agnes' Gate, is part of an ongoing dialogue around emotional / psychological / physical responses to architectural features—walls, windows, curtains, doors—that has been taking place in the artist's work. The title refers to two figures in August Strindberg's A Dream Play (1901) in which "the meaning of a door opening is debated by the deans of theology, philosophy, law, and medicine, who tangle with its potential for danger, knowledge, and truth; a gate ajar may represent freedom or imprisonment, paradise or hell, depending on the orientation of the passage." (Madeleine King) Echoing the ajar gate is the folded paper graphic – another motif frequently employed by Gothe-Snape - suggesting a future potential for language similar to the gate's offer of potential movement for the protagonist.
Exhibited: IMA, Brisbane, 2019.
Related works: Agatha Gothe-Snape, Three physical doorways, one conceptual wedge and a gentle breeze, 2017, National Gallery of Australia
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Agatha Gothe-Snape's POWERPOINTS Catalogue (2008–ongoing) is a series of digital artworks created with Microsoft PowerPoint that occupy a significant position in Gothe-Snape's practice. The latest release of POWERPOINTS coincides with the 2020 Melbourne Art Fair online viewing rooms hosted by Ocula. There are now over seventy works in the POWERPOINTS Catalogue.
An example from the POWERPOINTS Catalogue is included in our Viewing Room, 69. WE MUST RISK UNLEARNING, 2019 AGS.ppsx, "a revealing poem" formed from the titles of artworks in the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art at the University of Western Australia.
POWERPOINTS are purchased as a subscription which is updated periodically. POWERPOINTS are a numbered, open edition that are supplied to subscribers via Dropbox with updates distributed by email.
POWERPOINTS can be projected at any scale or viewed on any screen that supports Microsoft PowerPoint.
POWERPOINTS subscribers include numerous public and private collections internationally.