About the Projects
Judy Millar
At the Venice Biennale in 2009, Judy Millar will present The Collision, an exhibition of vibrant, large scale painted canvases that will poke through floors and ceilings, reach out into the space beyond the confines of the building, fold in and out and deliberately discard conventional modes of exhibition display. The canvases will move forward towards the viewer and backwards towards the wall, allowing the onlooker to move physically inside the painting. The installation will question the traditional relationship between the art and the exhibition space.
The exhibitions's painted components will be complemented by a huge printed billboard-like reproduction of one of the paintings, hung outside the proposed venue and facing the courtyard or the back wall, facing the canal. The print draws attention to issues about the original and the replica in art.
Millar ‘s style is loose and gestural, using hands, brooms, rags and wallpaper brushes to apply raw, primary colour to the painting surface. The wet paint is mixed and pushed aside to reveal previous layers of colour underneath. The surface of the painting is marked by dragging fingers, the traces of her arm movements, wrist flicks and wipes which can be "imaginatively ridden like a skier racing down a dipping and rising slope" (John Hurrell, 64zero3-Contemporary Art Gallery, 2007).
About Leonhard Emmerling (Curator)
Francis Upritchard
"I want to create a visionary landscape, which refers to the hallucinatory works of the medieval painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, and simultaneously draws on the utopian rhetoric of post-sixties counterculture, high modernist futurism and the warped dreams of survivalists, millenarians and social exiles." - Francis Upritchard
The installation Save Yourself by Francis Upritchard for the Venice Biennale 2009 will be an imaginary landscape. This landscape exists in an indeterminate historical period. The figures that populate this imaginary landscape are detailed with a psychedelic surface and handmade quality. The architectural structures are mixed-media constructions made of materials such as glass, wood, ceramic and leather. The landscape combines the antique and futuristic, making the scene both familiar and unsettling.
The structures draw on the artist's memories of existing architecture, such as a building shaped like a hamburger in Christchurch or a concrete sun umbrella in Cambodia. A seat is built into the end of one plinth distorting the scale of the installation. As the viewer sits they become part of this landscape.
The work explores ideas about time, hope and evolutionary change.
