Latest exhibition - Paintings and Drawings
MV Gallery - Paintings and Drawings · 545 days ago by Andrew Ivin
The first shared exhibition of the artwork of Ainslie Ivin-Smith and Julie Fleming Shea will be held at the Macleay Valley Community Art Gallery, Kinchela St Gladstone from July 12 – 22 2007.
The show comprises works on paper and oil paintings.
These two talented local artists have created a dynamic show which encourages the audience to engage deeply with the works.
You can also see Ainslie’s works from the exhibition at the Wonderland Framing website
Celebrating Mardi Gras · 1036 days ago by Andrew Ivin
Along with February comes Sydney Town Art’s latest exhibition Celebrating Mardi Gras which does indeed, as the title suggests, consist of a collection of works endeavouring to celebrate the famed Mardi Gras event and the general theme of ‘Celebration’ itself. From the opening image ‘Pretty Flag, words by the Flaming Lips’ Ainslie-Ivin Smith’s sewn canvas of a pink flag replete with flowers and hearts, Celebrating Mardi Gras is a diverse collection of sensual nudes, colourful, fantastical birds (as in the animal variety) and abstract depictions of the landscape. Celebrating Mardi Gras sets out to represent the diversity of representations people employ to explore Mardi Gras and the theme of Celebration. With an underlying mood of excitement and anticipation, each artist presents a wholly personal identification not just with the celebration of Mardi Gras, but the idea of Celebration in all its forms. The artwork in Celebrating Mardi Gras presents is at once stylish, vibrant depictions of colour and movement, and moody contemplative journeys through the landscape of the body and the land. Celebrating Mardi Gras runs to the 26th of March with the official opening this Saturday the 4th from 3-5pm.
A Taste of Nougat · 1125 days ago by Andrew Ivin
Small works of art by various regional artists suitable for your Christmas stocking.
8th December to 24th December 2005 and 4th January to 29th January 2006.
The official opening is on Saturday 10th December, 3pm-5pm.
Sydney Town Art is located at The Foundry, 181 Lawson Street Darlington, Sydney.
Salt – A Taste of Things to Come · 1182 days ago by Andrew Ivin
A sense of loss and of longing permeates many works in this exhibition. The impenetrably personal text in Goodbye reveals the uncertainty of parting, the hesitancy of saying Goodbye, “for a long time, little time, ever”. The duration and form that separation might take can only be imagined. All that can be known here is the primary pain of “Goodbye”. The use of text owes a great deal to Colin McCahon, but that can be said of any artist who has used text in their painting in the last 25 years. What is so moving about Ivin-Smith’s use of text is the way in which it converts the somber mottled colour field it inhabits into landscape. The rolling script seems to share the pulse of the landscape, moving in and out of the surface like an agonized rhythmic breathing.
A quite different use of text appears in Pretty Flag. Working from a Stars and Stripes structure the saturated pinkness of this painting recalls the vulnerability of feminine adolescence. The stars on the Pretty Flag are love hearts and the stripes are sewn earnestly but imperfectly, as if by a tender hand. The text here is fragmented and obscured by languid doodles, enticing the voyeur. One feels one is prying, finding another’s letter, perhaps that of a child, trying not to read it, yet desperate to know its contents.
As Ivin-Smith moves into landscape proper we are again exposed to a very personal interpretation, and one immersed in place, desire, and a longing perhaps to belong, at least to understand. There is a fascination with the sea, with coastal forms and with the transitionary, numinous nature of the water’s edge. In Gap 1 and Gap 11, a thunderous foam crashes against terrible rocks, falling back into itself in an oblivion of white nothingness. Desire meets head on with a fearsome vertigo.
In sharp contrast, Two Symbols from the Beach, a starfish and a useful looking metal ring lie side by side, united by the corroding, bleaching effects of salt and sunlight. Each delicate object testifies to its own history and substance and together, they reconstruct in minutiae, some moment in the history of the place, the beach and the tide which yielded them up to the artist’s inquisitive eye.
Kinchela Shed, a curious and imposing structure, of obscure vintage and purpose provides the design foundation for a series of fascinating images. In Kinchela Shed Design 1 – 1V, the architecture is reduced to the essentials of horizontal and vertical, of stark white against deep, recessive black, transforming the shed into a stage set, empty, poised, dramatically lit. In the playfully named Kinchela Shed with 32 Legs, the form totters above the ground, like some giant alien life form tippy-toeing across the landscape. Between the spindly legs, cool black spaces draw one in out of the glare.
A horizontal slot in the shed wall is the only point of contact between the exterior of the onlooker and the mysterious interior. This architectural eye functions as the portal between the binary opposite worlds of the seer and the observed. Through the dynamics of this opening, the viewer becomes the viewed, the watcher is being watched. In View Through the Shed, we are taken inside and permitted to look through the “eye” of the building towards the endless horizon of lush pasture, its mist of green suspended in the middle ground. The black interior encases the limited view, inducing claustrophobia and a cloying uneasiness. It is impossible not to think of the similar view which might have been had through Ned Kelly’s iron helmet, as the outcast staggered towards his inevitable demise.
In Side View of Kinchella Shed, the mood and temperature change dramatically from cool black and green to shimmering red and gold. The shed side is bathed in a scorching summer sunlight giving vent to a throbbing orange void beneath. The aging architecture almost melts in this unrelenting light.
While there is a melancholy edge to these images, Ainslie Ivin-Smith is clearly enchanted by her adopted environment of Hat Head on the New South Wales north coast. She surrounds herself with the sense of this place, its history, its essence, its fundamental forms and the drama of its being.
Marilyn Walters
Sydney. November, 2005
Dr. Marilyn Walters is an artist, writer and curator, formerly lecturer in Contemporary Art, University of Western Sydney.
Aperitif · 1327 days ago by Andrew Ivin
This was Sydney Town Art Gallery’s inaugral opening exhibition.
Ainslie’s work featured among a number of other New South Wales’ regional artists.
Previous Exhibitions · 1466 days ago by Andrew Ivin
November,2005 Countryscapes at Parliament house ,Sydney
November,2005 Group Show at Macleay Regional Gallery,Gladstone,N.S.W.