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David Bromfield
Centre Gallery presents
INSPIRATIONS OF THE DESERT
Paintings by Mojib Othman Alzahrani
On show from Friday 4th to Sunday 13th May
Open Monday to Friday 10 am to 4.00 pm
Mojib hails from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia..
His paintings have a great deal to do with peace between persons and nations and the possibility of universal humane decency. As one might expect he draws substantially on the brilliant Islamic tradition of formal non figurative art and the experience of the ever changing desert.
As Mojib says
I came from the middle of the Arabian desert with peace, hope and love. The desert is not just a pile of sand that burns in the hot sun. It has different lives and faces. It taught me to be more patient and more aware and sensitive to the world around me. This reflected directly on my art works. The inspirations of the desert opened my eyes wisely to many issues in my local environment and internationally.
A great lesson that the desert taught me is to look widely and not just stare at one thing. Instead, look at things in depth as the widening horizon of the desert. From this point, my paintings are for humanity in general, including children’s issues, the dignity of women, renunciation of war and massacres that have clouded over some places in the world, preserving the environment with messages to live in happiness and optimism. I tried to deal with each issue in a single painting in this exhibition. 
Every one is welcome to the opening. If you cannot make that we hope you will be able to visit the exhibition during its run.
Victoria Park Centre for the Arts
presents
A Yearning For Peace 
On view from Friday 1st of June to Friday 8th June.
Weekdays 10.00 am to 4.00 pm Saturdays 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm Closed Sundays
Art works by Senior Students from the Australian Islamic College Kewdale, WA.
This work from the first Islamic students to study art in Western Australian reflects their desire for peace, their need to set a distance between themselves and their earlier violent and traumatic experiences.
Art has often offered this kind of opportunity, a calm reflection on a troubled past, a yearning for peace.
We are grateful to their teacher Amelia Mahdy, who originated this course for the opportunity to show her pupils’ work.
She has explained her intentions as follows
A Yearning For Peace
I grew up during a time of war in my country, however, when I came to Australia I was yearning for peace.
I tried to create a peaceful environment for my students, so that they could produce artworks reflecting peace and love using their cultural Islamic background and merging it with modern Australian art.
My intention is for students to produce several pieces of artwork that reflect their various cultures and teach them to respect cultural diversity and teamwork.
Most of these students grew up during a time of war or violence which had a big impact on their consciousness and gave them a desire to bring a message of peace and love through out their work.
Their work is like a bridge between their homeland and their new home, “Australia”. The bridge that they want to create is the merging of Australian culture with Islamic culture.
They wanted also to show their new identity as an Australian by creating artworks reflecting their cultural background and presenting them in Australia, their new home.
Amelia Mahdy.
We have begun a sequence of exciting exhibitions of photographs from the Fotofreo Fringe.
Currently we are showing
Night Suite by Rod Schaffer from 23rd March to 5th April
Then
Caged by Kelly Hussey Smith, from 6th April to 20th April.
Rod Schaffer’s ‘Dark Series’
Photographer Rod Schaffer’s sequence of 23 darker than dark prints of oddly familiar images of objects and places tells an almost universal story, at least if Australia is a typical section of the endlessly extended space we all live in.
Schaffer begins with a sparkling shot of the infinitely interlaced gates of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens. Their pristine metal pattern glows against a mid deep, matte black background, that could be either space or substance, absence or absolute solidity. There is nothing inside the darkness, no shifting shadows, no leaves in the midnight breeze . The gates stand alone monumental guardians of a long vanished European project, to represent the local nature as part of an unseen universal order from elsewhere. Only the gates exist against the blank black of an alien imaginative universe
Schaffer’s all pervasive velvet black runs through his remaining 22 photos. In each one an image glows suspended in shadow, cut off from all the alternatives suggested by context. He selected every image as part of a game about what it might be to be Australian, to exist in a place with little history and no consequences, but the hard reality of a few dense, fragile, infinitely compressed, facts.
It was Bataille and the Surrealists who first discovered this quality of existential presence in images published in the alternative surrealist magazine Documents in the 1930’s. Boiffard’s isolated image of an enlarged big toe, or Lothar’s of the hooves of slaughtered cattle lined up in the entrance to an abattoir have the same heart stopping isolation as Schaffer’s image of two half crushed cars, one on top of the other, lost like two lovers embracing, deep under fathoms of darkness.
Further along, a pathetically weak image in wilting bronze, of those ironic heroes of our inadequate reality, Burke and Wills, looms in the dark, like two long murdered corpses floating to the surface of an abandoned harbour. 
Each of Schaffer’s images stands at a similar point of connection, a cross roads between common Australian-ness, a local memory, and a reference in universal experience. Termite mounds feature in two photos, bulky, twisting, cancerous, shapes born from blackness, stirring against the low light.
Specific places linked to disaster or the memory, and misery, of incoherently administered death can also come alive, isolated in black velvet. The Church at Port Arthur, even the edge of a foul prison, the Convict Wall, where hard, hard stone erupts from the dark, like a huge, bluntly textured blade. Even the buckling planks a back yard shed hold fear tight inside it shimmering walls...
Three from Freo
The three photographers taking part in Three from Freo are 
Matthew Haynes, a Victoria Park artist who records incidents in the life of homeless men with a sympathetic and occasionally humorous eye in his exhibition 'No Fixed Address'.
Gary Cockburn from Melbourne, whose magnificent frieze ‘Roads by Night,
Lanes by Light’ adorns our corridor wall straight from the Edinburgh Festival.
Peter Annand whose humorous anecdotal exhibition ‘The Same Sea Twice’, follows incidents from his grandparents’ correspondence in a series of brilliant photo collages.
Matthew says of his work:
''I was initially inspired by a soup kitchen at the end of my road. Whether living in such close proximity to a homeless community is fortuitous or unlucky is a matter of perspective. Personally, I wouldn't change it. They belong here and have sense of community as much as anybody else. Initially I got to know the local characters, and then pushed further afield and met more people, some I photographed, and some I just got to know. I feel honoured to have been able to capture these moments, and I feel more honoured to have met these wonderful people. I truly learnt something new everyday about myself, and societies perceptions, some of which I hope to who in these photos. I made some great friends that moved in circles that were invisible to me before. I live in an affluent city where having money, options and possessions are the status quo. Through local exposure I would like to show how the other half live in comparison to the wealthy masses''.
Gary Cockburn’s work originated in his photographic explorations of light and atmosphere in Adelaide and Melbourne, and then continued in a completely different vein during a trip to the UK.
“The shots I’d been taking in Australia were very exuberant, full of energy and colour and movement,” comments Cockburn, “while the photos I took in the Lake District – after a family bereavement – were much more meditative. The fact that the images are on a common theme was really just an accident, but a very useful one.
As a photographer, I’ve always believed it’s not just the content of an image that conveys emotion, but the light and composition”.
Peter Annand describes the intention of his work in some detail:
''My grandparents, Fred and Nell Annand, exchanged hundreds of letters while he was at the First World War. Fred returned all the letters he received, bundled in cotton ammunition bags, for safekeeping at home. Letters were checked by military security and took around two months to arrive. Occasionally, they were lost on torpedoed ships. More urgent messages were sent by cable.
This series of pictures combines fragments from that correspondence with photographs of waters around Brisbane, where many of Fred’s and Nell’s descendants still live''.
Our next artist Rod Schaffer says of his surrealistic Night Suite
December Drawings
Martin Heine and Merrick Belyea
Benedict Moleta Perth Music Interviews Launch, December 10th
Kurb Gallery 312A William Street
Until 24th December
December Drawings came about when Heine and Belyea decided that they both needed to exhibit outside the rapidly deteriorating framework of Perth’s commercial galleries. It's no secret that almost all ‘art is for money spaces’ are still feeling the pinch of the post GFC financial tsunami. So far, however, none of them have shown much sign of changing their business model to include more exciting, if risky, shows. The Kurb, on the other hand has always been known for spontaneous, not for profit, opportunism.
No two approaches to drawing could be further apart in intention and outcome.
Heine ‘drew’ dressed in an op shop suit, in an action performance with bright toned liquid paint, old teddy bears and what seemed to be half an acre of thick butchers paper and a chair that slowly disintegrated as he used it to make his marks. The result, together with the paint spattered suit and a video recording with photos of the original action can now be seen at the Kurb. A chair full of cheerfully painted teddy bears invites you in. The sweeping lyricism of the painting comes as a surprise. It is like Mark Tobey at his very best, an endless plane of water lilies, floating on an infinite spectrum of daylight hues.
Belyea by contrast draws by sanding down a thick coat of a single colour on hard board until burns and brown patches of support blossom. His chosen colours are usual a version of cadmium yellow or orange so that the picture plane often assumes the flat, uninflected look of the aftermath of galactic battle of the final flurry of an exploding super nova. Belyea may have mistaken the elimination of all inflection for an invitation to the contemplative, but his flat surfaces will intrigue the eye for some little time.
Musician Benedict Moleta, another artist with difficulties with the ‘art as expensive entertainment’ view of the creative life chose the Kurb to launch his new collection of interviews with Perth musicians. The interviewees range from some with more than ten years experience of the Perth scene, to others who have just produced their first CD.
Moleta himself is working on his 6th album, which will be launched in March 2012. Each of his CDs has presented his unique insights into personal and creative survival Perth, in lyrics that mix extraordinary detailed observations of the local ‘desert of the real’ with memories of friendship and relationships focused through incidents of intense immediacy.
Another Hound one the new songs he presented at the Kurb describes his decision to acquire a second dog while driving tot he pizza with his hound leaning its bullet shaped head on the dash board. Moleta brings the same ‘mosaic’ approach to his interviews. Through the usual musicians moans and mumbles there emerges a sense of serious, original musical concerns, disavowed and disassembled a little bit, for sure, but always about, somewhere.
The Oats Factory Gallery, Christmas P-arty until December 25th
Everyone knows about Christmas shows. They are the place where, ‘The Christmas Present that Time Forgot’ first saw the light of day. Work that failed to sell in previous exhibitions comes together with ‘affordable’ small works made especially for the occasion by artists, under some pressure from their dealers to make something suitable for the occasion.
Fortunately the Oats Factory, just over the tracks and past the bookshop on Oats Street, has chosen against this popular but pathetic response to the festive season. Every piece in its Christmas P-arty show (on view until Christmas eve) is first, a work of art, and only second affordable. This is important, as, whatever the price, a work of art is always a work of art, so paradoxically an affordable work is often a huge bargain that will engage you forever just as the most elaborate and expensive work might.
The Oats Factory is filled with opportunities.
For instance, the delightful small ‘paintings’ of Cynthia Ellis delight with their precise manipulation of a dense square mass of multicolored oil paint, often 4 or 5 centimetres deep, so that the slow moving, solid, mass of oil paint, flowing and articulate, with its internal stresses rendered in coloured striations, like a gloriously over ambitious, but joyous, humbug. Ellis is better known for several superb massive large paintings in corporate foyers, each several square metres, covered in paint 15 centimetres deep but these small works have an identical, absolute, undeniable presence.
This is not paint applied to make an image or at least the reminiscence of an image or an optical experience produced by carefully shaped layers of paint. It is paint as creation, the world before the big bang, paint heaving to give birth to a new world, as did the dark waters when the Lord of all Creation passed across them.
By contrast the classical small figure sketches in oil, by Zoe Chong Seng are about the image as it emerges from paint, into a world of light, energy and movement. Paint suddenly develops hard and soft edges, which instantly become peaks and troughs of light, moving across a male figure lit from the side, in an open white shirt, as it turns, slowly, but dramatically, before one’s gaze.
Figures without paint feature in a tiny dramatic montage by Peter (no relation) Ellis, with the title Quick Franz! The Fuhrer is a Zombie shoot him in the head. Their tiny scale and the absurd, but poetic, premise of an alternative version of the last days of the Third Reich somehow echoes the slow disappearance of the most evil man in history into a mushy digital myth, the last glimpse of a childhood game of soldiers seen from a great distance. Soon the great mass murderer with the strange moustache will be no more ‘real’ than Attila the Hun.
Several other painters pursue different versions of this great dissolution of anything that could be taken for granted. Matthew Jackson deploys some familiar resources of Pop art - words painted over and under faces and details of figures, cropped from unseen complex events in the imagination. Jackson, however, paints the fragmentation of clues to identity, metaphysics, not the brash confidence of consumer Pop. His hard edges are uncertain, his colours deliberately fugitive. David Ledger interpolates the geometry of the outdoor Pop concert into landscape and jungle. This is the universe as a stage of mirrors an infinite trap for the ego.
Abdul Rahmen-Abdullah’s striking bronze figure Heifer delicately covered in glowing red lacquer is an even stronger challenge to western high art conventions of truth to materials. The bronze only shows its shiny hooves. This exciting entry to the new year by Victoria Park’s only commercial gallery promises very good things for the future.
