Click each thumbnail for a large image and artwork details. Artists included in this collection: Robert Boynes, Will Coles, Sybil Curtis, Fiona Fenech, James Guppy, Waratah Lahy, Al Munro, Patsy Payne, Lezlie Tilley and Peter Tilley.
Click each thumbnail for a large image and artwork details. Artists included in this collection: Robert Boynes, Will Coles, James Guppy, Waratah Lahy, Melinda Le Guay, Leslie Oliver, Patsy Payne and Lezlie Tilley.
PLEASE NOTE that the 2 Danks Street Galleries are closed on ANZAC DAY, starting from 6pm on Tuesday April 24 until Thursday April 26 at 11am.
Image: Will Coles, ‘ANZAC’ 2008, fibreglass resin
182 x 90 x 80 cm, Purchased by Artbank
Click each thumbnail for a large image and artwork details. Artists included in this collection: Tanmaya Bingham, Tammie Castles, Will Coles, Todd Fuller, James Guppy, Irianna Kanellopoulou, Helena Leslie, Carol Murphy, Mylyn Nguyen, Janet Parker-Smith and Jimmy Rix.
Various versions of ‘Laissez-Faire’ by Will Coles
installed around Australia and Europe.
We are pleased to introduce a new feature on the Brenda May Gallery blog: stockroom collections. Each collection will contain an image gallery of thumbnails which individually link back to the full size image and details of each artwork. This week, our collection highlights artwork priced under $500.
Artists included in this collection: Will Coles, Todd Fuller, Irianna Kanellopoulou, Waratah Lahy, Melinda Le Guay, Emily McIntosh, Helen Mueller, Al Munro, Mylyn Nguyen and Lezlie Tilley.
Currently the more books you have the more intellectual you are supposed to be or suppose yourself to be. Interior designers scour second hand stores for ‘old looking’ books for an image of intellectualism, learnedness & culture. Now the Kindle & the iPad seem to finally ringing the death knell of the printed book so physical books will be revisioned. Soon you may simply be viewed as antiquated & out-of-touch. Expect the next decade to see books being dumped like so much unwanted firewood.
But various things will be lost when books disappear. The smell of a book, old or new. The feeling of an old book, the texture of a hardback. A hiding place for money, love notes, drugs & other secrets. The scribbled notes from previous owners & borrowers. The present of a book for a birthday, an event, a right of passage or another reason.
Customer: [Pointing to a shelf] Those books, how much?
Bernard: Hmm?
Customer: Those books. Leather-bound ones.
Bernard: Yes, Dickens. The collective works of Charles Dickens.
Customer: Are they real leather?
Bernard: They’re real Dickens.
Customer: I have to know if they’re real leather because they have to go with a sofa. Everything else in my house is real. I’ll give you two hundred for them.
Bernard: Two hundred what?
Customer: Two hundred pounds.
Bernard: Are they leather-bound pounds?
Customer: No.
Bernard: Sorry, I need leather-bound pounds to go with my wallet. Next!
Will Coles 2012, quote from the tv show Black Books
These have almost become a theme for me. I made a three metre long rusting version & hung it from a crane on Cockatoo Island. When I went to uninstall it again I looked across the harbour at it & lots of little real plastic soy sauce fish were washing up in the tide at my feet. Like dead & dying fish this plastic pollution was beaching itself as it must in its millions every year on every beach.
I’ve found it odd that a smiling fish is the container for sauce for your seafood, rather like the old adverts of happy pigs at the butchers. The blankly happy fish that vomits soy sauce on your sushi!
-Will Coles, 2012
Will Coles, ‘Untitled’ 2012, white cement – ed of 50, 19 x 82.5 x 37.5cm each
The current exhibitions by WILL COLES and JAMES GUPPY will be on view until Saturday 24th of March. Be sure to make a day of the Danks Street complex on the 17th for our Super Saturday when the Galleries will be presenting free art talks from 11am until 6pm. Will Coles will be giving a talk about his current body of work at 2pm. No RSVP is required for any of these events and we do hope you can make it.
The figures in these new works by James Guppy’s are dredged from his unconscious to throw light onto the cold darkness of rationality. Through these paintings, Guppy continues the examination of myth and powerful women – not the predictable, nourishing earth mothers, but rather those types that society traditionally feared and marginalised: the witch, the virago and the furies.
The wry sense of humour integral to the work by Will Coles can be found throughout his current exhibition Nihilist Archaeology. From the concrete fish sculptures based on the tiny take-away soy sauce bottles piled high in a corner, to the framed military-like medals made from crushed beer tops. Coles is concerned with the way “the trivial and shallow now represent the peak of Western Civilization.”