1st Aichi Triennale Nagoya, Japan | Pick Me | Varied noisy | Going Back/Volver | Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney | I’m worried this will become a slogan | It’s Good/It’s Bad | Wilderness Society Offices | Poster Reduction | 130 Davey Street | Australia rising #1 | Living in other people’s houses | What do you want from me?
1st Aichi Triennale Nagoya, Japan
Feeders: Black Kite, Varied Tit, Great Cormorant.
Seven Channel video installation.
2010
Camera and editing: Raquel Ormella and Abigail Moncrieff
Bird Wranglers: Bec Dean, Kate Gane, Sarah Goffman and Abigail Moncrieff
Performers: Raquel Ormella
Shapiro Galleries
162 Queen St Woollahra
Opening Thursday 12 6-8pm
Exhibition continues Friday 13th through to Saturday 21st November
Pick Me #15
83 x 162cm
Cotton, flanelette, ribbon
2007
Pick Me #6
90 x 170cm
Cotton, flanelette, ribbon
2002
Wild Rivers: Cairns,
Brisbane, Sydney
Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney 2008
Texta, electronic whiteboards, thermal prints
Image of the Wenlock River by Kerry Trapnell 2005
All images documented by Christian Carpurro
Acquired by the Monash Museum of Art Collection
Exhibited in:
Revolution-Forms that turn, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, curated
by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Art Gallery of NSW, 2008.
The Ecologies Project, curated by Geraldine Barlow and Dr
Kyla McFarlane, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2008.
This work was supported by New Work Grants from: Visual
arts and Crafts Board, Australia Council for the Arts
and Arts ACT
Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney 2008
Texta, electronic whiteboards, thermal prints
Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney 2008
Texta, electronic whiteboards, thermal prints
All Images :
Varied, noisy. 2008
Record: edition of 180; Woven badges: edition of 300, Field Guide zine:
edition of 200; Postcard: edition of 350
Field recording: Geoffrey Robinson and Raquel Ormella
Editing: Geoffrey Robinson and Raquel Ormella
Digital and vinyl mastering: Harry Williamson, Spring Studio
Record Pressing: Zenith Records Melbourne
Album and sleeve design: Marija Katalinic, OD Creative
Letterpress plate setting: Raquel Ormella and Caren Florance, Artist
Book Studio, School of Art, ANU
Letterpress printing: Louise Redman, Poppy Letterpress
Production Assistant: Bec Dean
All images documented by Christian Carpurro
Varied, noisy is a series of multiples that describes the presence and absence within local landscapes of the Indian (Common) Myna, an imported feral bird regarded as one of Australia’s worst environmental threats. While the Indian Myna is ubiquitous within urban environments and central to the subject of this work, it does not concentrate on the direct visual description of the birds. Instead Varied, noisy focuses on the way we recognize and normalize the Indian Myna. Mynas are partly commensal with humans in that they like cleared areas with some trees, such as domestic gardens, and often nest in cavities in buildings. Furthermore, the road and rail network has assisted their dispersal into inland Australia, as they feed off discarded rubbish and spilt produce. Field Naturalist clubs in country areas often state on their websites whether or not Indian Mynas have arrived in their town, because their territorial aggression leads to a direct decline in native bird numbers and diversity.
Central amongst the multiples in Varied, noisy is a “parallel groove” conventional vinyl record, which is a disc that on each side has two tracks that spiral in tandem towards the centre. Viewers are invited to place the stylus on the record to let chance and timing determine which of the tracks is played. The record is made up of four soundscapes recorded in Canberra Nature Park – a group of nature reserves surrounding and within the city of Canberra – abutting or close to domestic housing. In some of these reserves, due to their size or proximity to housing, Mynas have established a firm foothold and can be heard continuously throughout the recording. Side A opposes sound recording from a high conservation valued reserve, Mulligan’s Flat, with sound from a newly built “affordable” housing suburb of Gungahlin. On side B recordings from the edge of the large reserve of Mt Ainslie, are compared with the smaller reserve of Mt Taylor. Mt Taylor however is in a part of Canberra where the volunteer trapping of the Indian Myna Action Group has significantly reduced Myna numbers. The listener becomes aware of the greater diversity of birdcalls by hearing or noticing where the noisy call of the Myna is absent. The juxtaposition of the tracks, with the order of play determined by chance and human interaction, highlights the impact of encroaching urban development on Canberra Nature Park with ensuing decline in bird diversity.
Varied, noisy takes its title from the description of the call of the Indian Myna, Acridotheres tristis, as described in Simpson and Day’s Field Guide to the Birds of Australian Birds (2004). Another of the multiples is a “field guide” exclusively containing descriptions of the Indian Myna. While this at first appears to be a comment on the possibility of the Indian Myna making up the majority of the Australian bird population, as it now does on some Pacific Islands, on closer reading the field guide displays the nationalistic prejudices of some of the writers towards an extremely invasive feral bird. The call is often described as an “ugly raucous sound”. In some guides quoted, the Myna is taken out of the taxonomical order and is placed at the back of field guides with the other pervasive European ferals. Questions of political geography are also highlighted, as one of the only field guides available to its native distribution in Afghanistan is contained within a field guide to the birds of the USSR.
The third multiple is a series of woven cloth badges of Australian native birds that are beginning to return to areas where the Indian Myna populations have been reduced by volunteer trapping. The last multiple is a letterpress postcard that lists the dates of introduction and establishment of the Indian Myna in Australia. All multiples can be purchased directly by viewers at a reasonable price, so their dispersal echoes that of the Myna: the multiples rely on humans to become artworks through their usage and distribution.
Going Back / Volver
Series of 40 photographs (21 x 27 cm) made for Transversa the exhibition that was part of the South Project Gathering in Santiago Chile.
Transversa, curated by Zara Stanhope and Danae Mossman. The South Project.
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Galería Metropolitana, centro cultural matucana100, Santiago, Chile, September 2006.
Dane Mitchell, Maddie Leach, David Clegg, Daniel Malone, Fiona Jack and Lonnie Hutchinson (New Zealand); Ash Keating, Raquel Ormella, Brook Andrew, Selina Ou, Caroline Ho-Bich-Tuyen Dang, Tom Nicholson and Andrew McQualter (Australia)
Acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW
Exhibited in: Optimism, Contemporary Australian, curator
Julie Ewington, GOMA, Brisbane
I am worried this
will become a slogan
I’m worried this will
become a slogan 1999–2009
double-sided banners, sewn wool and felt
9 banners,
sizes various
I’m worried this will become
a slogan 1999–2009
double-sided banners, sewn wool and felt
9 banners, sizes various
I’m worried this will become a
slogan 1999–2009
double-sided banners, sewn wool and felt
9 banners, sizes various
I’m worried this will become
a slogan 1999–2009
double-sided banners, sewn wool and felt
9 banners, sizes various
I’m worried this will become
a slogan 1999–2009
double-sided banners, sewn wool and felt
9 banners, sizes various
130 Davey Street
(2005)
Whiteboards, temporary and permanent texta markers.
130 Davey Street arose from my attempts to work both as an artist and activist with Australia’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental activist organization, the Wilderness Society. The Wilderness Society has successfully protected many of Australia’s wilderness areas, in particular in the most southern state, the island of Tasmania.
The work is a series of drawings made with permanent marker pens on portable melamine whiteboards. The images are based on photographs I took over a period of two years, in the office spaces of the Tasmanian Hobart Campaign Centre. The work investigates the placement and role of visual imagery, particularly wilderness photography, within the Centre. The translation of these photographic images created a dialogue between conventions of nature photography and landscape painting. The sublime depiction of nature, found in both these genres, was interrupted by the bureaucratic form of the whiteboard, creating a critique of both the Wilderness Society and the conventions of wilderness photography. The work called into question the romanticised notion of the direct action activist and political artist embedded in the forest.
130 Davey Street
by Bec Dean
Raquel Ormella’s 130 Davey Street is a drawing installation comprised of a collection of spatially arranged and stacked whiteboards of various sizes and physical conditions. In its three incarnations at Artists Space, New York (2005), Mori Gallery, Sydney (2005) and the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2006) the installation was framed by half-painted walls of flat, beige paint - evoking the colour scheme of standard, small office environments and Australian domestic property rentals. While the installation is an accumulation of entirely generic, man-made materials – whiteboards, permanent markers and house paint – what it represents in sections across these shiny, white surfaces, are images from a very specific office, the Wilderness Society’s Hobart Campaign Centre, devoted for decades to environmental conservation – more recently to the protection from logging, of old growth forest environments in Tasmania.
An encounter with this work is not a simple exchange for any viewer, it requires some work to visually interrogate its aesthetic layers, as well as the cultural and political references that Ormella brings into play. In the first instance, the drawings themselves engage with the viewer’s understanding and perception of colour and use of perspective within the western art tradition, translated upon a surface created not for such contemplation, but for the easy absorption of dot-points, Gant charts and timetables, by people who work in offices. The drawings range from outlines of the busy clutter of desks and office spaces, to coloured-in copies of posters, signs as well as other ubiquitous whiteboards (listing campaign goals and statistical information), all rendered within the limited, flat spectrum of permanent pen. In some instances, the artist employs only royal blue and red ink, laying two monochromatic drawings on top of one another so that one has to concentrate intensely to pull the separate images apart. There is a kind of violence and discord in these compositions that further amplifies the dissociated, plastic materiality of the work from the natural world, which is ultimately where 130 Davey Street refers back to.
Embedded within Ormella’s drawings are illustrations of photographs and paintings – images by Australian photographers and artists that became synonymous with the Wilderness Society’s conservation movement in Tasmania. In particular, Ormella identifies Peter Dombrovskis’ Rock Island Bend taken in the early 1980’s when Tasmania’s hydro-electric project threatened the now protected Franklin River system. The Wilderness Society’s persistent use of the image was considered largely responsible for turning public opinion in favour of saving the river. Quite simply, it brought the inaccessible, untouched splendour of the wilderness into people’s homes. Along with other Dombrovskis images, and reproductions of Australian landscape paintings, Rock Island Bend is depicted within the flattened-down fabric of Ormella’s drawings as almost part of the furniture; hidden behind files; sitting next to signs of protest and peeping over the top of crowded desks.
This was no fiction, but as Ormella found the works when she visited and photographed the offices in Hobart. As such, the artist’s interpretation of her own photographic pictures containing such significant images as simple marks on a whiteboard, bestows Rock Island Bend and other key works from Wilderness Society propaganda with the same importance in this context as technology, communication and labour in the dissemination of political ideology and campaign platforms. On one level, the images could be considered demeaned within the quotidian clutter of office life, but I see this rather as a democratic vision, where an artist’s work can be held in equal regard to what many consider to be the more important workings of our society. In Ormella’s work, these photographs implicit and key to the functionality and purpose of an office and an organisation.
Wilderness Society Offices 2004
Two images from a series of 6
Ink jet print
Wilderness Society Offices 2004
Two images from a series of 6
Ink jet print
Poster Reduction
(2005)
Electronic whiteboard, temporary and permanent texta markers, thermal
paper print outs, photocopied enlargements.
Poster Reduction
Blair French, curator Who’s Afraid of the Avant Garde?
Raquel Ormella's Poster Reduction continued the artist's ongoing investigation of the intersections of artistic practice and the workings and representations of social activism.
More specifically Ormella extended her recent work utilizing whiteboards – functionary trappings of any and all bureaucracies from the corporate to the collective – as representational architecture for imagery based on Wilderness Society campaigns that subtly highlighted the structures of language and dialogue underpinning the workings and rhetoric of environmental campaigns. In Ormella's work activist politics abuts the more overtly self-reflexive formal sphere of contemporary art, revealing fissures in the drawing on the histories of each.
This work featured two coloured texta-pen drawings on separate sections of an electronic print-out whiteboard. One replicated a photograph taken by the artist of the inside of an office in the Wilderness Society Campaign Centre in Hobart. At the centre was a whiteboard with various slogans listed – the workings of a brainstorming session attempting to come up with the most effective sticker in a public campaign in support of the "Gunns 20", 17 individuals and three organizations—the Wilderness Society, The Greens and the Huon Valley Environment Centre—being sued by Gunns. Gunns, a privately owned company making massive profits from selling old growth forest as woodchips to Japan claims that the activist campaign defamed the company resulting in a loss of profits.
The other drawing replicated a photograph taken of a massive Eculyptus regnan within the Styx Valley Forest in Tasmania by artist Catherine Rogers. This pairing of images yoked together the very different spaces of environmental activism, whilst crucially each suggested something of the way in which complex environments and issues tend to be reduced to singular, memorable, almost iconic representations for the purposes of social and political efficacy. On one hand, a campaign dealing in a myriad of economic, social and institutional complexities hanging on the effectiveness or otherwise of a bumper-sticker. On the other, the arresting form of a single majestic tree, only visible in such a form thanks to the clearing of bush already around it, assuming the function of public icon of the natural environment subsuming reference to the necessity, even to its own survival, of a wider, more complex, less overtly photogenic eco-system.
By its very character, to a greater or lesser extent, representation of all forms tends to flense away details, to reduce, synthesize and focus material for rhetorical purpose. Ormella overtly worked with this by also presenting the compressed monotone print-outs of her whiteboard drawings. Here fine details, colours and tonal ranges were reduced to basic black and white contrasts (by analogy to the simplistic statements of what passes as much contemporary public discourse), leaving highlighted and isolated just a few slogans and the rudimentary form of a single tree.
Australian Rising #1
Cotton, felt, metallic thread, ribbon.
380cm x 180cm
Territorial
1-30 June 2007. Canberra Contemporary Art Space
Australian Capital Territory:
Raquel Ormella, Silvia Velez and Bernie Slater
The Northern Territory:
Franck Gohier, Catriona Stanton and Gary Lee
Curated by Andy Ewing 24HRArt, Darwin and David Broker Contemporary Art
Space, Canberra
Essay by David Broker Director, Contemporary Art Space, Canberra
As Australia continues its struggle with a clear sense national identity and we hear talk of a values test for new immigrants (and even tourists), defining characteristics just seem to become more elusive. Freedom, mateship, the fair go, tolerance and the English language have all been touted as defining what is distinctly Australian and yet it must be asked if these qualities do actually distinguish us from other nations and further, are they just hypocritical? While the source of these uncertain notions is national, coming from the mouths of politicians, it often appears that they come from Canberra.
Although there is a tone of aggression in the term territorial, it is rare that Canberra is defended by its residents let alone people outside the ACT’s borders. It is frequently derided as dull, a city with low esteem and without soul. The Prime Minister doesn’t want to live here, many politicians suffer their time in Canberra and public servants it seems, would rather be elsewhere. Australian Capital Territory represents power in a country that is paradoxically noted for its apathy and a history of contempt for authority - and there is little doubt that politicians lower the tone of a city that might otherwise boast many advantages. Politics and its obligatory spin generate an environment of national delusion that is addressed from different angles in the work of Silvia Velez, Bernie Slater and Raquel Ormella.
Over the years Silvia Velez has explored the role of politics in Australian society from a point of view that emphasises people over politicians. Noting that the residents of Canberra “ … never really see the pollies. We know they are up on that hill, under the big flag, somewhere”, Velez opens a dialogue of “semi- political consciousness”. While residents of the ACT are automatically set apart by the fact of living in the same city as those elected to run the country – actual contact is every bit as minimal as that of people living anywhere else.
In a city with more than its fair share of government offices the lanyard is so ubiquitous it becomes a kind of meaningless uniform. In Disruptive Identities Velez’s camouflage lanyards represent, not a distinctive identity, but rather one that is blurred by the facelessness of those representatives who “inhabit” that hill on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin. In the lead up to the 2007 election Velez sees a nation gripped by a fear and paranoia that has silenced everyone from the top of the symbolic hill all the way down. Partisan politics and new ideas are almost meaningless in an environment where it is often difficult to remember who said what and from which area of politics they came. When Velez comments “ We are living in a state of camouflage” she speaks of an area far greater than the ACT.
Bernie Slater draws upon propaganda images from China’s cultural revolution for his ironically titled work We Know Who We Are. The idealised posters that called the people of China to arms by asserting a specific cultural identity are applied to culture and politics in John Howard’s Australia where arguably – we have little idea of who we are. Hence the “necessity” for a values test.
Unlike China, where propaganda provided the populace with a defined identity set by the Communist Party, Australian mass media provides cultural content in the form of mindless entertainment while also being used by politicians to fuel the flames of discrimination. In other words the “Howard identity” is elastic, based not on who we are but who we are not - at the time. It’s an identity well suited to nationalism based on politically expedient division. Reference to Mao Zedong’s images of equality, harmony and prosperity which we now know were far from the truth, are ultimately uncannily similar to Howard’s dubious assertions of a free, fair and tolerant Australia.
The Prime Minister John Howard and his legacy (to date) are also at the centre of Raquel Ormella’s Australia Rising. With a large banner that is based on the Australian flag but not a literal description, her aim is to produce a nationalistic object of such dazzling extremity that her audience might be compelled shield its eyes. Looking at the broader picture, Ormella’s intention is to expose Howard’s political double speak in a way that renders increased bureaucratic small mindedness and the marginalisation of that which is “unaustralian” no longer disguisable. “Mutual Obligation” emblazoned across the banner points to how those people who missed the economic boom have been screwed by a government intent on convincing the populace that they have never had it so good.
With its status of Capital City and the presence of the very people we love to hate, a significant part of the experience of living in Canberra includes questioning why one has actually chosen to call this unusual environment home. In this Ormella is no exception and her banner is not just to be waved at the Parliament in an accusatory fashion. Its satirical edge and over the top materiality provides a stark contrast to Canberra’s modernist and brutalist architectural aesthetic while demonstrating that being at the mythical centre does not mean that one is necessarily blinded by the national delusion. On the contrary, critical art has a currency in the ACT that just isn’t quite the same elsewhere.
It's good/ It's bad
gauche on paper
dimensions variable
2006
It's Good/It's Bad was part of the exhibition to celebrate 50years of ABC TV broadcasting. The work is a response to viewing Four Corners programs about climate change. These programs were made in the period 1997 - 2006.
Living in other peoples houses
Excerpt from Wayne Tunicliffe’s essay from the exhibition Bittersweet. AGNSW 2002
Raquel Ormella uses a more direct form of urban realism to incorporate content, and particularly political content, into her practice. Ormella utilises both the visual language and rhetoric of street protests, left wing politics and protest graffiti. She makes banners, signs, t-shirts, graffiti, videos and zines, which she exhibits and distributes in public contexts as well as in art galleries. They have an amateur workshop aesthetic and also recall the interlocking style and agendas of 1970s political, performance and conceptual art. While her works rehearse the classic issues of left-wing politics – ownership and economics – Ormella inflects them with her own anxieties about making and exhibiting art works - production, distribution and reception - and the vexed issue of political efficacy in art practice.
Entitled Living in other people’s houses, this project centres on questions of ownership and use, primarily of property and of the conceptual material art works are made from. It has evolved from previous projects and events, including Ormella’s contribution to an Artspace exhibition Temporary Fixtures and the brief history of the artist run gallery Squatspace. As part of the research for a work she made for Temporary Fixtures, Ormella interviewed a number of artists who, prior to its redevelopment, had been squatters in the Gunnery building now occupied by Artspace and other arts organisations. One of the artists Ormella interviewed pressured her to use this research to make a documentary rather than an artwork, as a more effective way of representing the history of use and occupation of this site and the political actions that had occurred when it was a squat.
Squatspace, in a pointed word play on Artspace, was an artist run space set up by Lucas Ihlien and Mick Hender in a disused shopfront in the row of empty buildings occupied by squatters on Broadway, Sydney, in 2000. A very public battle ensued with South Sydney Council, who owned the site and continued to manage it until it was taken over by the developers Australand, which generated a vociferous debate over ownership, occupation and the use of real estate in the inner city. The buildings themselves became a forum for protest when their facades were painted with slogans and commentary on the progress of the squatter’s battle with the council. Ormella was associated with Squatspace and the Broadway squats, though not directly as an organiser or occupier. Ormella and Ihlien painted the words ‘Brief Utopia’ on the front of the building, a slogan which already had a history.
The poignancy of ‘Brief Utopia’ and its suggestion of optimism and defeat, was an arresting statement. The ambition of Squatspace to provide an affordable and inclusive art venue was admirable and its short life is to be lamented. The question of what art works could be made in response to the life of the squat and what degree of involvement was needed to establish a form of ownership of the experience, informs the works Ormella has either made or has invited other artists and friends to contribute to this exhibition. The artist’s anxiety about using this material and who to ask permission from is conveyed in the banner with the text This would be easier if I was making a documentary. This uncertainty about efficacy and content animates Ormella’s practice, particularly in such a prime piece of real estate as the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Other works include a zine Ormella has produced with Ihlien and Hender, which recounts the history of the Brief Utopia graffiti at Broadway and at The Verge, an artist run space in Perth where they had painted it previously and which was also closed due to the site being redeveloped. Other components, including a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Undocumented Homeless’ and the sign This is not the life my mother wanted for me, both personalise and universalise the poverty and career uncertainty many artists experience. On a more irreverent note, another zine is the current issue of Flaps by Regina Walter and Ormella. This issue is called ‘Nicked’ and has stories about their shop lifting experiences. The question as to whether a documentary would be a more effective political record remains unanswered; but it is a fact that this material can form the conceptual source for a provocative exploration of personal and collective social agency and for political agency in art practice.
Temporary Fixtures, curated by Jacqueline Phillips, Artspace, Sydney, March 2001.
