Exhibition open

6 July – 6 August 2016

Monday, Thursday & Friday 9am - 5pm Tuesday & Wednesday 9am - 7pm, Saturday 1pm - 4pm

acsa.sa.edu.au | 7 Mulberry Road Glenside SA

Daily Practice explores an artist’s commitment to maintaining a daily visual art practice. The digital and physical journals of Rees and Parnis are displayed as interactive artworks alongside completed drawings, paintings, lightbox-mounted prints and moving image works. This exhibition invites viewers to become voyeurs, allowed exclusive intimate insights into the processes and journeys each artist has taken to explore and resolve their ideas. Daily Practice celebrates the routine activity that builds the foundations of a sustained and successful career as a practising artist.

Exhibition opening Tuesday 12 July 2016, 6 – 8 pm Refreshments provided Opening speaker Emeritus Professor Ian Gibbins Flinders University

Daily PracticeSally Parnis and Annalise Rees

Sally Parnis

Artist statement

The discipline of drawing every day focusses my thinking and becomes a nidus from which ideas evolve. The drawings are multifarious. Sometimes they are tenuous bunches of lines, at other times painterly bravado. They can be documentary, propositional, source or finished work. Working digitally and in layers, I can retrace my drawing steps and tease out those parts of the drawing experience I want to explore.

In this body of work I’m trying to find the sweet spot between image and material, object and imagination. I want to share the meditative act of drawing in the landscape. Then, by painting with images found within the drawing journey, allow the viewer freedom to take over where I left off.

Come along and follow me, into a magic landscape!

Biography

Sally Parnis, a trained anesthetist, graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Art with Honours from Adelaide Central School of Art in 2009. Her artmaking practice is based on daily observational digital drawings produced using an iPad and drawing application, from which studio work is developed. With this process she combines traditional and new materials and techniques to create drawing, painting, lightbox, digital print and animation works.

Since 2006 she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Vista (2015) and Gleam (2014) at Hill Smith Gallery and Wild as the Wind (2014) at Adelaide Airport. Her work has been selected for several prize exhibitions, including the Adelaide Parklands Prize (2016; Highly Commended 2014), the Emma Hack Art Prize (2016), the Fleurieu Water and Environment Prize, the Yorke Peninsula Cheetham Art Prize and the Doug Moran Portrait Prize (2006).

Parnis has undertaken three commissions: a portrait of Dr Jeanette Linn, President Australian Medical Association SA (2011), the Exeter Hotel Commission (2007) and a portrait of The Most Reverend Philip Wilson, Archbishop of Adelaide for the Archdiocese of Adelaide (2005). She regularly runs digital drawing app workshops, and has been artist in residence at Saint Peters College and Saint Ignatius College. Her work is held in private and institutional collections across Australia.

sallyparnisartist.wordpress.com sallyparnisdrawings.wordpress.com

Annalise Rees

Artist statement

In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges. (J. Conrad, ‘The secret sharer: an episode from the coast’, 1910)

This work has come about after taking several trips to sea on board a professional cray boat as part of my PhD studies at the Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania. My research project is investigating the use of drawing as a primary means of encountering and articulating place and space, in particular, maritime environments. Observational drawing is an important component of my practice, which regularly involves working directly in the field. This recording of what I am seeing, experiencing and thinking is played out in my journals. My journaling and process of collecting are the central focus of my project. I am most interested in the ‘doing’ aspect of the search and the provisional nature of the journal as a thinking and recording device.

These trips to sea, into unfamiliar and unknown environments, have provided an ideal physical and conceptual context in which to explore the use of drawing-based methodologies used to orientate and situate ourselves in the world. The world is constantly in flux and subject to change. Examining how we steady ourselves within this fluctuating context may perhaps provide opportunity to re-think the frameworks and structures by which we understand our world, many of which are drawn.

The daily activities of cray fishing utilize first hand ‘body knowledge’ gained through years spent at sea, negotiating the ever changing maritime environment. This working knowledge is combined with the use of drawing based technologies such as 3D mapping software, a GPS plotter and an echo sounder to assist with ‘shooting’ pots for gathering their prized catch. My observations of the skipper and deckhands at work offered a parallel way of thinking about how I come to know myself and my place in the world through drawing as an embodied practice.

Biography

Annalise Rees (currently living in Tasmania, born on Kangaroo Island) graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Art with Honours from Adelaide Central School of Art in 2004, and in 2014 began a scholarship-funded doctorate in drawing at the University of Tasmania. In 2005 Rees received the Adelaide Bank Award for most outstanding arts graduate in South Australia. She was the first international artist to be invited to Japan to participate in the Daikanyama Installation Project, Tokyo, where she was awarded the Jury Prize for her large scale drawing installation, Construct, in 2007.

Rees has exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia, CACSA Project Space, Mildura Arts Centre, and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She has been an artist in residence at Sanskriti Kendra, India, 24HR Art Darwin, Newington Armory, Sydney Olympic Park, Hill End NSW, and has worked with the International Cartographic Association’s Arts & Cartography Working Group in Montreal, Canada. In 2010 she was an Inside SAM’s Place artist in residence and exhibitor at the South Australian Museum. Public art engagements include commissions for Adelaide City Council and the City of Salisbury in 2010 and for the new Royal Adelaide Hospital development in 2012. She has been a finalist in the Whyalla Prize, Heysen Prize, Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Forestry SA Wood Sculpture Competition and the Paul Guest Drawing Prize.

annaliserees.com annaliserees.blogspot.com.au

images (Front; Back) Annalise Rees, The Hauler (detail), 2015, graphite on paper, 60 x 80 cm; Sally Parnis, Sunlitscape Lightbox, 2016, iPad finger drawing printed on rigid polyester film, timber, MDF, LED strip, fixings, 40 x 30 cm. Edition of 5.

Version 22 June 2016