It is with great pleasure that we introduce everyone to the fifth iteration of Chalk Horse. We are beginning with a group show that brings together artists that we have been working with for sometime and some new friends that we hope to have an ongoing relationship with. Perhaps Kate Mitchell’s work This Artwork Exists In Your Mind can serve as a starting point for the show. It is a work about possibility and hypothetical potential. Instead of an artwork as such each text work stands in for an artwork to come. Created through the help of an artificial intelligence, an online script generator, the texts represent an artwork not yet realised. The hand-coloured pencil work brings the real hand of the artist back but it is still in a sense once removed. The new Chalk Horse is for us a new beginning that will be a space for artworks not yet realised. Mitchell also showed at the first iteration of Chalk Horse in 2008; she represents part of a legacy of art production and showing that we are proud of and proud to continue.
We are happy to show again the work of Nathan Hawkes who had a very successful solo show last year. This is a continuation of that work. The work sits within various genres and various approaches to mark making. The works represent for us a lively and provocative contemporary hybridity. Tara Marynowsky continues her series of detourned postcards. The postcard embodies the memory of the past and Marynowsky amplifies this sense of ghosting. Clara Adolphs is also a new exhibitor to the gallery and continues our interest in contemporary figurative painting. Centred primarily on portraiture whose work equivocates between paintings ability to imply presence but also absence, solidity but also fluidity.
Alexandra Standen creates ceramic work that is innovative and again playful in relation to generic and traditional shapes somehow made strange. The hand of the maker and the material is placed at the for, however the works still maintain a strong connection to the modernist object. Danny Morse also takes the high seriousness of pop art approaches and makes them fun and amateur. These little stone effigies of important markers of sport in our culture are like little votives, part of a ritual of making personal what is so often represented as heroic and grand (especially in Australian culture).
Overall many of the interests of Chalk Horse as a gallery are present. This show exemplifies the way the gallery feels that art and the work of artists is a serious way of knowing the world. The place of mark making and process, an ongoing interest in figuration and worldy observation, although not the only aspects represented by the gallery, are no doubt major interests of our stable.
Oliver Watts
