Two New Exhibitions At The Physics Room

Two New Exhibitions At The Physics Room

French Dressing Geoff Newton 14 July–15 August 2010 Opening preview: Tuesday 13 July 2010, 5.30pm

For The Physics Room, Melbourne-based artist Geoff Newton has produced a new suite of paintings drawing influence from 1980s and 70s recipe books. Visit any bookshop and it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed by the vast array of books selling glossy pictures, step by step guidelines and tasteful trends back to us; and that’s only in the cooking section.

Operating as literal ‘how to’ guides, recipes document and transmit specific cultural practices to do with the preparation and consumption of available and obtainable ingredients. The fact that these ingredients are able to be selected and manipulated by any savvy home economist or budding chef and transformed into more visibly enticing and desirable arrangements, doesn’t fall too far away from the tasteful selections of any contemporary art collector.

From home and entertaining magazines to fine art periodicals, serial publications consistently act as shop windows and dressed sets for the ideas and objects they contain, as well as operating as a time-bound archive and index of fashionable tastes. Packed with photographs and specialist information, auction catalogues have come to be valued throughout the world not only as collectors’ items in their own right, but as indispensable reference guides.

Think colourful stacks of vegetables drizzled with rich sauces on clean white plates accompanied by glistening table settings, while stacks of the latest glossy magazines glimmer promisingly upon coffee-tables and bookshelves alike. French Dressing sees Newton conflate the format and aesthetic rationale of both food photography and fine art publishing with an eye for the economic realities that underline both.

Geoff Newton completed his BFA in 2000 through The Australian National University, Canberra, having spent 1997–8 on exchange at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Newton lives and works in Melbourne, is Co-Director of Neon Parc and is currently participating in Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces’ Studio Residency Programme 2009–2011. Recent solo exhibitions include: Geoff Newton, Block Projects, Melbourne (2009); Study For A Protest Painting, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2009); Studio Tan, Gallery 9, Sydney (2008); Geoff Newton Paintings, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2007); Strictly Commercial, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2006); and Hygiene Genie; Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2005). Recent group exhibitions include: Texticles, curated by TCB art inc., Melbourne Art Fair (forthcoming in 2010); The Politics of Art, curated by Jan Duffy, Linden Gallery, Melbourne (2010); Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces Studios 2009 exhibition, Melbourne (2009); and Don't Worry It's Only Money, City Art Rooms, Auckland (2009). Newton has exhibited widely and his works are held in various major collections including: Artbank, Rupert Myer AM, KPMG Australia and private collections in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Théâtre de Poche Aurélien Froment 3–28 June 2009 Opening preview: Tuesday 2 June 2009, 5.30pm

Invoking the illusory potential of images and investigating the way languages, be they visual, linguistic or symbolic, articulate relations among things, Théâtre de Poche presents its audience with the increasingly enigmatic figure of a magician who proceeds to conjure a series of images into the air.

Explicating a cyclical tale, this playful meditation by the French-born, Dublin-based artist Aurélien Froment sees stills from cinema history slowly shuffled and hieroglyphs nestle alongside natural wonders, challenging notions of the arrangement and precedence of images and all that they evoke. When considered in translation, ‘Pocket Theatre’ also prepares its audience for an act of simple but effective entertainment and ultimately references the fabled figure of Arthur Lloyd, the ‘Human Card Index’, who could produce almost any kind of printed item from one of his pockets on request.

Situating itself knowingly as a partial and subjective take on the all-pervasiveness of contemporary visual culture Théâtre de Poche investigates the production of both image- and object-relations and the discursive meanings that such relationships inevitably disclose.

Articulating the tension, and playing with the proximity, between signifier and signified within the system of signs in flux within, Théâtre de Poche confabulates cinematic fragments, relics and discursive tropes with sentience and mystique.

Aurélien Froment (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Since graduating from the fine arts academy of Nantes, France, he has been working with different media such as film, sculpture and photography on a variety of projects that have taken the shape of installations, scale models and mass produced items.

Works by Froment have been shown at, among others, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Tate Britain, London; the Nam June Paik Centre in Seoul; and STUK, Leuven. He is also currently preparing a series of solo presentations at Montehermoso, Vitoria; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Gasworks, London and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco.

* A re-release of the media release for the exhibition Théâtre de Poche Revisited (14 July–15 August 2010) by Amit Charan, opening on Tuesday 13 July 2010, 5.30pm.

Permission to reproduce documentation from Théâtre de Poche by Aurélien Froment has kindly been granted by the artist, The Physics Room, and Mark Gore who photographed the work in situ.

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