BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA.- The Institute of Modern Art presents “4 x 4 - Vernon Ah Kee / Jewel McKenzie / Kim Demuth / Annie Hogan,” on view through July 12, 2003. Vernon Ah Kee’s ostensibly innocuous computer generated black and white text works actually reveal a devastating commentary on the comprehensive dispossession of Indigenous Australians. Just when you thought you were off the hook, Ah Kee calls on personal experience to challenge complacency by concentrating on the subtleties or nuances of ingrained racism. Stating that the predominant culture, ‘has constructed Australian popular culture to suit itself’ he champions the people who are deemed ‘unsuited’ in a way that is initially amusing and ultimately disturbing. Ah Kee’s unique social and political commentary often takes superficial, banal and trivial aspects of everyday life and presents them in a way that suggests the opposite. While humor has always been an effective method of political point scoring and making a point accessible, Ah Kee takes this one step further by frequently referencing rights that are so basic that they seem scarcely worth mentioning. Or in other words he uses the tip to expose the iceberg in its entirety. ‘If I was white,’ he says, ‘I would be able to dye my hair blonde and look absolutely normal’ and ‘I can’t even buy bandaids the same color as my skin’.



Ah Kee is currently teaching at Queensland College of the Arts, Griffith University and is represented by the Bellas Gallery, Brisbane. 



As a dressmaker and corporate bookkeeper, Jewel Mackenzie has brought the skills she developed to her conceptual visual arts practice with startling effect. Currently completing a Doctor of Visual Arts at Queensland College of the Arts, Grifffith University, Mackenzie has employed and transformed the familiar ‘pinstripe’ as an adaptable and recurring theme in her work. Worn by Mafia chieftains and in Corporate Culture (2000), the pin stripe has been used by Mackenzie as a symbol of masculine power while simultaneously diminishing its status via the creation of absurd garments. In her Back Door Project (2002) she recreated the back doors of galleries such as the IMA and the MCA in pin stripe. Exploring the vernacular use of ‘back door’ from tradesman’s entrance to jumping the queue, Mackenzie’s humorous take on the day to day business of galleries also lampoons the mystique of our repositories for cultural artefacts. In Gemini Paintings, (2002) a homage to the paintings of Frank Stella, Mackenzie momentarily abandoned the pin stripe for Belgian linen only to paint them back with the devotion of a dogged Modernist.

Mackenzie exhibited work at the IMA in Fresh Cut 2001 and exhibited regularly at Soapbox Gallery in 2002.



When faced with Kim Demuth’s work we have to negotiate what are often very disturbing images and yet we also laugh. It’s in the timing — just when we are so unsettled that we hate to look and yet cannot turn away we discover the key, the pun or the trigger which allows us to laugh. His severed head stored in a glass-doored freezer moves infinitesimally like the fabled French aristocrats’ in the basket. Demuth, although inspired by the range of figurative art practice in the 20th Century, seems, conceptually at least, most closely aligned with a Surrealist mindset. He has inherited Ernst’s love of ‘incompatible realities’ and ‘the “spark” which leaps across the gap between these realities’. Demuth himself refers to his love of the interstitial space, that which occurs between the poles of Cartesian rationality, and his fascination with the ‘beyond’ in both its physical and metaphysical senses. In this regard, the work of Kim Demuth is not about ‘truth’ but our own subjective perceptions. He is constantly returning to the perceptual gap between what is portrayed and our own methods of dealing with it. Is he holding up a mirror to our serious emotional concerns or is it all some sick joke? Did the longest century of war and bloodshed leave us incapable of telling the difference?



Excerpt from an essay by Courtney Pedersen, ‘Grim Humour, The Work of Kim Demuth’ for a catalogue published by SOApBOx gallery, Brisbane 2001. 

Light plays an essential role in the way that we experience the world. Shifts between light and dark divide our day between work and play, our lives between social and private. Varying intensities of light also affect our moods, emotions and health. It is probably not surprising for a photographer who relies on the relationship between (natural) light and (chemical) film, that Annie Hogan is concerned with ways of ‘capturing light’. What Hogan’s ‘captured light’ communicates, however, is surprising. Or illuminating. Hogan has an amazing capacity for illuminating light’s presence so that it fills the frame of the photograph with its ‘physicality’.



Currently completing her Samstag Scholarship at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Hogan has recently embarked on a new body of work entitled discharge where she utilizes illumination from a power source. ‘In this body of work the camera confronts the light from the position of the floor and the obvious physicality of bedrooms and kitchen are obscured in favor of a distrait view of the ceiling.’ The impressions of ceiling fixtures and distant bright lights overwhelm, like an open horizon with an unknown amount of space behind. At once retreating and advancing the blown out image of light refuses to provide a stable position to make sense of what we see. Again, we are prompted to think about the relationship between light and the act of perception.