Conversation Piece

Kurt Brereton & Kendal Heyes

Project Contemporary Artspace

September 16 - 27 2009

opened by
Professor Diana Wood-Conroy
(FCA UOW)

The Mystery Object

works below by Kurt Brereton
click on thumbnails to see larger images

Project Contemporary Artspace  in  Wollongong

Sandon Point-time, 104cm x 156cm
oil on canvas, 2009
$1900

Eros-Time
122cm x 167cm, oil on canvas, 2009
$2900 SOLD

Blogger-time, 47cm x 55cm
oil on panel, 2009
$290

Artist Statement
Conversation Piece (Kendal Heyes & Kurt Brereton)

Conversation Piece (Kendal Heyes & Kurt Brereton)Conversation piece uses the dynamics of the gallery space to provoke a dialogue between the works of the two artists, and between works of different periods within each artist's work.

Without leading the viewer by the nose, the exhibition sets up correspondences, differences and similarities between both bodies of work. Moving around the gallery space, it is possible to see how certain themes, such as time and memory, are approached differently by each artist, and in turn within each artist's work as they investigate to these themes over time.

The clue to this exhibition is in the title itself, Conversation Piece, and this sets up a centrepiece of the exhibition. This enigmatic object that might have come from an Op shop, sits on a table in the empty centre of the gallery. There is a chair on either side of the table, suggesting a dialogue about what this object might be. This is reminiscent of the 'mystery object' in TV programs like Collectors, where experts are asked to guess the original function of an obscure item presented to them. It harks back to a nineteenth century English habit, of having an exotic or enigmatic object displayed in a cabinet of curiosities that sat in the parlour. Such a "conversation piece", was often something picked up in "the colonies", and served as an entre to dinner conversation.

This "conversation piece" serves up a metaphor for the exhibition as a whole. It suggests that art sets up the conditions for a dialogue, between the viewer and the object, and between viewer and viewer, and between object and object.

Kendal Heyes' has selected work from the 1990's - large paintings based on the doodles of Soren Kierkegaard - to his current work: a series of large inkjet prints which are vignettes from visual experience; and pyrographic drawings - images made by burning into the surface of the paper. These are all in different ways engaged with ideas about time and the graphic line.

Kurt Brereton is showing paintings including a new series of time-maps or chronographs. Each image is covered with a mesh of marking-time dashes performed over a number of days or weeks. On closer inspection various past screen memory fragments reveal themselves from beneath the noise of the surface – welling up through the present of the here and now.

Michelle Maus - in conversation with the artists: Dapto Returned Artist's League Club, August, 2009