Janet Holmes à Court Collection

The Botanical in Peril

tanya.sticca@artgallery.wa.gov.au — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 07:03:48 +0000

The Botanical in Peril

Makaela Rowe-Fox organiser for the School Strike 4 Climate movement.

tanya.sticca@a… Mon 06/07/2020 - 3:03pm

20 August 2019

This month, as part of our AGWA Pulse program, the Art Gallery of WA was the setting for an inspiring and thought-provoking panel discussion on climate change. Featuring young climate activists ranging in age from 16 to 23, these young voices brought clarity and urgency to the immense challenges facing our planet today. Here, they share their thoughts on the kinds of actions we can take – both large and small – to set the world on a different path.

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How Do We Save the World? Climate Change Panel Discussion at AGWA.

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Makaela Rowe-Fox

I am sixteen years old and an organiser for the School Strike 4 Climate movement. I participate in national and state calls, outreach to groups, unions and schools, and I have spoken/chanted/occupied at the major March 15 and May 3 strikes earlier this year.

Why do I strike and organise these events? Because I want a future on this planet. We are living in a climate crisis. Already we are experiencing extreme changes to weather conditions with unprecedented droughts, floods and other natural disasters across the planet. We cannot wait until the effects of what’s occurring now are visible from our kitchen windows – we must act as pre-emptively as is still possible to minimise the effects of climate change. This means compelling the government to abandon fossil fuels, invest in 100% renewable energy NOW and to draw down carbon through intensive reforestation.

I am privileged to be able to be an artist and performer. I dance with Co3 – the flagship contemporary dance company in WA – and also act with the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company. Art allows us to view the world in creative and critical ways. We can see this through AGWA’s exhibition, The Botanical: Beauty and Peril, which showcases work that discusses the climate crisis.

The phrase “business as usual = extinction” applies to artists as much as anyone else. We can’t rely on people to take up our calls for change. We need to be the ones taking action alongside everyone else. I am currently involved in organising the September 20 action which is a global strike: not just students, but everybody. It is expected to be the biggest collective human action this planet have ever seen.

Rachel Rainey

A lot of people find climate change an overwhelming issue and feel like there’s nothing that they can do that will make a real difference in combatting it. I would like to encourage those people to see the film 2040 – it really helps to view the climate crisis from a solution-based perspective and provides a lot of suggestions on how you can help join the fight.

While you’re waiting to see the film, try changing your search engine to Ecosia (which plants one tree for every 45 searches), and changing your super fund to Future Super (zero investments in fossil fuels and financial performance in the top quartile of Australian super funds) – all it takes to switch is ten minutes and your tax file number.

It is really exciting and empowering to see so much community support behind climate action, to have a platform for youth voices to speak on the subject, and to have people truly listen and engage with these young people.

Rachel Rainey

The panellists discussed a wide range of topics related to the climate crisis.

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Chelsea Andrews

Climate protest and activism are good, but I think especially in this day and age it’s not going to be enough to make change. With the political right on the rise, I think it’s only making people angrier. Just shouting at our government isn’t going to make action happen. Potentially more helpful ways include meeting with local MPS to discuss climate and how they can help, writing EPA (Environmental Protection Authority) submissions or looking out for projects that ask for public comment.

What do I believe it will take to save the world? State and nations coming together to tackle this crisis. International policy has worked in the past, as we saw with the Montreal Protocol, which is now seeing the ozone layer repair itself! The Paris Climate Agreement isn’t strong; but it could be improved with more investment and learning from successful measures like the Montreal Protocol. The Paris Climate Agreement needs sanctions and realistic targets for anything to work.

Artists have a great place in climate change action, albeit secondary. They aren’t afraid to confront the world, and expose what their truths are. Art can be a very emotional thing and call many people to action. However, I think the issue is that its main audience is the privileged: once art can be enjoyed by all, I think a lot more good and empowerment can come from it.

Follow the work of these inspiring young people through organisations including School Strike 4 Climate, Millennium Kids and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.

AGWA Pulse

The Botanical: Beauty and Peril

AGWA Collection

Janet Holmes à Court Collection

Climate Change

AGWA

Card Text

This month, as part of our AGWA Pulse program, the Art Gallery of WA was the setting for an inspiring and thought-provoking panel discussion on climate change.

Young Voices on Climate Change

Rewinding the Panorama

tanya.sticca@artgallery.wa.gov.au — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 06:44:34 +0000

Rewinding the Panorama

Sohan Ariel Hayes Panoramic View of Albany (Kinjarling), The Place of Rain 2019 (detail). Advisors: Lynette Knapp (Menang Noongar) and Prof. Stephen Hopper AC⁣. Three channel digital video colour⁣, 5760px x 1080px, 25fps, 2.1 sound, 10’08” minutes edition: 1 of 3⁣. Commissioned for the Janet Holmes à Court Collection.

tanya.sticca@a… Mon 06/07/2020 - 2:44pm

5 September 2019

Currently showing at the Art Gallery of WA, The Botanical: Beauty and Peril exhibition brings together works from the State Art Collection and that of Janet Holmes à Court in a wide-ranging, and often bracing look at representations of the Australian landscape.

Among the works on display is the striking video piece Panoramic View of Albany (Kinjarling), The Place of Rain (2019), by Perth-based media artist Sohan Ariel Hayes, in which he reinterprets an 1834 panoramic etching of Albany by British surveyor Robert Dale.

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Perth Media Artist Sohan Ariel Hayes with his work Panoramic View of Albany (Kinjarling), The Place of Rain (2019).

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This reinterpretation of a perhaps notorious work in the exhibition – the etching is notable not just for its panoramic format but also the gruesome fact that it was first exhibited in London alongside the decapitated head of Noongar leader Yagan – prompted extensive research into the social and environmental history of the original print. Read on for an interview with Sohan Hayes in which he shares his insights on a number of concerns and themes raised in his work.

Working with archival materials has been a key part of your practice for some time now. What was it about this Robert Dale etching in particular that captured your interest?

The panoramic format first grabbed my attention – I can’t think of any other panoramic images done in Western Australia before 1900, so it’s kind of unusual. Then there are these striking tableaux of Menang people and soldiers across the foreground of the view. From all the research that we’ve gathered, the view appears to be nineteenth century real estate propaganda. I mean it looks quite beautiful – it’s a picturesque image of Albany a few years after settlement – but actually its purpose was to sell something. It’s advertising a land opportunity and was a powerful vision that attracted investors to the Swan River enterprise. In the act of doing so the work becomes a story about dispossession: the stripping of the rights of the Menang people without their knowing or consent.

Can you tell me a bit more about the research process that went into developing this work, and how you drew out the ‘invisible histories’ in the original?

This work has also been reimagined by other Western Australian artists, Christopher Pease and Gregory Pryor, so those works feed into the dialogue around this one. A key link has been conversations with (Menang Noongar Elder) Lynette Knapp and (WA botanist) Stephen Hopper. Stephen Hopper had actually just done a couple of lectures on the fact and fiction of the Dale panorama. So I went and spent some time with the two of them, using Stephen’s scientific background and Lynette’s Menang/Noongar knowledge. And we just did these passes across the painting and all of this detail came out of that. Obviously we can’t include all of that detail, so there’s this emotional, intuitive response which comes out in the work; a simple shift from day to night, from summer to winter storm, this rain like tears when these monsters begin to appear.

With this work being specifically commissioned for the exhibition, was there any sense of responding to AGWA as a historical and cultural site itself?

Good question. Dale’s print has been shown regularly in the past by AGWA, but never alongside the descriptive pamphlet by Dale which was originally distributed with the print and an illustration of the head of Noongar warrior Yagan. By placing this new work next to the original print, the intention is to trigger a dialogue between the two images. Once you’ve seen the new work, I don’t think you can ever look at the original print in the same way again.

Sohan Ariel Hayes Panoramic View of Albany (Kinjarling), The Place of Rain 2019. Advisors: Lynette Knapp (Menang Noongar) and Prof. Stephen Hopper AC⁣. Three channel digital video colour⁣, 5760px x 1080px, 25fps, 2.1 sound, 10’08” minutes edition: 1 of 3⁣. Commissioned for the Janet Holmes à Court Collection.

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The depiction of a numbat in the mouth of a feral cat is a striking image. How does this representation of invasive species define the work as a whole?

Once The Botanical co-curator Laetitia Wilson and I got talking about how there’s an invading species which is the Europeans, at the same time they are also bringing along other invasive species – rats and cats and rabbits and so on. So we started to play with images of those invasive species becoming feral and all the killing that has resulted and continues as we speak, every night and day. The fat cat is a monstrous image and, as a phrase, often represents someone who’s got too much wealth and has become gluttonous.

The work shows a huge storm sweeping the landscape, which then dies away with clear skies returning as the video loops. Does this hint at a sense of hope for how we might approach these issues differently in the future?

This was an idea that came from discussions with Kingsley Reeve who created the sound track for the work. There is a connection with the moving panorama of the mid-nineteenth century which we mimic digitally here – where they literally used to rewind the painting on a scrolling mechanism to restart it – and so we tried to rewind sound and image and found the effect mesmerising. The result is that the work doesn’t really have a start or end – it just keeps oscillating. It suggests a potential for change. In connection with the environment now, if we don’t change course, there is a great storm coming. Or are we already in it?

How do you think the colonial and conquest-oriented mentality represented in Dale’s etching links to wider environmental issues we are faced with today?

This whole capitalist expansion in the 19th century was, in part, a great mechanism of turning nature into profit at zero cost. There was the technology and finances to take advantage of the so-called ‘land opportunity’ here in this country and convert it into profit. I think it’s really important to look back and understand that mechanism, to understand those it benefited and those it dispossessed. After all this is not something that was done once – the engine’s been running rampant repeating the cycle of dispossession all over the entire globe and now it threatens to cost us the earth.

What role do you think art and artists have in bringing public attention to the kinds of environmental issues that are highlighted in the exhibition?

I think as artists we’ve got a responsibility to help tell stories – to make them personal. My good friend, Anna Kosky, who puts together Writer’s Week for the Perth Festival, said she was at a conference on climate change earlier this year and one of the key scientists said that they’ve done all they can, now it’s up to the artists to tell the stories. That’s a big ask, but I think we can help shape a vision, to help shed light on reality, to encourage deep thinking and sustained action.

The Botanical: Beauty and Peril runs until 4 November.

Sohan Ariel Hayes

The Botanical: Beauty and Peril

AGWA Collection

Janet Holmes à Court Collection

Digital art

AGWA

Card Text

Currently showing at the AGWA, The Botanical: Beauty and Peril exhibition brings together works from the State Art Collection and that of Janet Holmes à Court in a wide-ranging, and often bracing look at representations of the Australian landscape.

Interview with Artist Sohan Ariel Hayes

Janet Holmes à Court Collection

The Botanical in Peril

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Rewinding the Panorama

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