The artists would like to acknowledge the generous support of the following:

The Spanish Embassy and the Ministry of Culture.The Australian National University.Carlos Aragón Gil De La Serna, Counsellor of the Embassy of Spain.Graciela McNamara, Cultural Office, Embassy of Spain.Gordon Bull, Head of the ANU School of Art.Sarah Rice for the Text.Daniel Bell for catalogue and invitation design.Damien Geary for his photography.

Images L-R. Rosalind Lemoh-Hand of Fatima, 92 x 55 x 18cm Wood, hydrostone and lead. Dio-nisia Salas Hammer-raw3000, 152 x 137cm, Oil and acrylic on canvas. Vectra (top), Oil, acrylic enamel on canvas, 120 x 130cm. Rosalind Lemoh-Strange Fruit, Concrete and lead, 34 x 10 x 39cm. All images of Rosalind's work by Damien Geary.

Curriculum Vitae- Rosalind Lemoh

Education-Bachelor of Arts (Visual) First-Class Honours, ANUSolo Exhibitions C’mon Eat Me Lover, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, A Feast for Fools, GRANT PIRRIE, Sydney.Selected Group Exhibitions2009 Rica Visión, Australian National University, Canberra.Blaze, Gormon House, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra.Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Redleaf Council Chambers, Sydney.Hatched 08:National Graduate Show, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth.Blake Prize, National Art School, Sydney.The Churchie National Emerging Art Exhibition, Anglican Grammar School, Brisbane. Head First, Manuka Space, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra.Linden Postcard Show, Linden Contemporary Art Centre, Melbourne.Sculpture on the Edge, Bermagui Headland, Ber-magui. 2007,Graduate Exhibition, Foyer Gallery Australian National University, Canberra. One Small Step for Mankind, 6 x 6 Miniature Show, Defiance Gallery, Sydney.ANU School of Art Drawing Prize, Foyer Gallery Australian National University, Canberra.Residue, M16 Art space, Canberra.States of Belonging- CLAW (Canberra Living Artist Week), Arts Act, Canberra.2006 Visage, Members Show, Canberra Contem-porary Art Space, Canberra. Graduate Exhibition, Foyer Gallery Australian Na-tional University, Canberra.

Curriculum Vitae- Dionisia Salas Hammer

Education2004 - 2007 Bachelor of Visual Arts, First Class Honours, Australian National University

2006 ANU Exchange Program to L'Ecole National Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris

Solo Exhibitions2009 2009 A * C Odyssey, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra

Group Exhibitions2009 Rica Vision, Australian National University, Canberra2008 Fundacion Guasch Coranty, International Painting Exhibition, BarcelonaThe Painting Depot, M16 Gallery, Canberra2007 Graduate Exhibition, Australian National University, Canberra

Grants/ Awards/ Prizes2008 Torres Spanish Traveling Scholarship for Young Australian Artists2007 Floriade and King O'Malley's Painting Prize2006 ANU School of Art Travel Support Scholarship.

Rica Visión.Australian National University School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra.17th- 23rd of August 2009.

Spain has left its indelible mark on the two artists showcased in this exhibition, Dionisia Salas Hammer and Rosalind Lemoh, who both travelled to Spain in 2008 after receiving the Spanish Embassy’s Torres Travelling Scholarship, and the Torres Accestuit and Cultural Co-operation Program grant, respectively. There they had the opportunity to tour the country’s prestigious galleries and museums, as well as meet with the institutions’ directors, curators, and conservators.

The influence of Spanish Masters Diego de Velázquez and Francisco de Goya can be seen in Dionisia’s painting series. She draws inspiration from Velázquez’s layering techniques which have become ever more apparent now that the pigment is fading from many of his canvases, slowly revealing the drawings, re-drawings, and mistakes which were previously invisible. Dionisia’s paintings mimic this double act of revealing and concealing, each layer itself obscuring and obscured by another, rising and falling through the picture plane, remnants of which are suddenly laid bare with the aid of the scalpel cutting and peel-ing back the skin of the painting. Velázquez and Goya are also instrumental resources in Dionisia’s quest to capture light in painting. Goya’s use of lead-based white paint enables his splendid and dreadful visions to leap forward from the darkness in all their striking beauty and terror. It is this sense of light as projected forward, exploding from the canvas that Dionisia employs in her paintings. The luminous over-exposure creates a blinding effect on the viewer, dazzling the eye and forcing it into a state of heightened sensitivity and hyperactivity, refusing it a place of rest or a central focal point.

Dionisia’s aspiration is for her paintings to embody the raw, energetic dynamism of her experience in Spain, particularly the life and vibrancy of the flamenco bars in the South.Process, media, technique and visual reference all come together in Dionisia’s work as she pours, sprays and throws paint in ways that defy prediction or predetermination. The process is dependent on chance and can no more be controlled or planned than the dynamic forces of nature she draws on for her subject-matter. Dionisia’s paintings are abstractions based on astrological and stellar explosions, lightning, earth movements and natural disasters. Dionisia is captivated by the colours, forces and ener-gies beyond our command. These moments of eruption blow apart the history of art as a story of control, perfection, and stability.For Rosalind Lemoh, the works of Velázquez and Goya are dramatic, excessive, rich, violent, luxurious and decadent; features that are not often present in sculpture, but which she exploits in her tableaux sculptures. Where Dionisia’s paintings explore luminosity, Rosalind’s sculptures delve into the dark – the inkjet-printed images emerge slowly from the surrounding blackness of the granite, like the ‘return of the repressed’ surfacing, rising into the visible, and leaving its traces before falling back into the darkness of the past. These images, lurking in the shadows, raise the spectre of a partially concealed, latent violence. The darkness represented is foreboding and expectant, alluding not only to the work of the great masters but to contemporary cultural referents, like Peter Greenaway’s iconic film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.

In Spain, Rosalind was particularly drawn to the Baroque still life paintings in the Prado (especially those of Juan Sánchez Cotán). Responding not as a painter but as a sculptor, she focused particularly on the formal composition of these works, as well as the prevailing metaphoricconnotations that fruit and flowers have with sexuality and death. These still lives are primarily vanitas paint-ings depicting the cruel but indissoluble entwinement of beauty and decay. Memento Mori, death, violence, sexuality, beauty and the ‘flesh’ are constant thematic companions throughout Rosalind’s sculptural series. The idea of the ‘barbaric woman’ has a strange appeal for Rosalind as she contests the colonialist invest-ment in ‘primitivism’ and appropriates the dual arenas of feminism and ‘black’ politics. Here Rosalind draws on her Sierra Leone cultural heritage, using visual referents such as the arrow heads and devil-head masks on her father’s wall, in a subversive response to the colonisation of women’s bodies, in particular as depicted by Picasso in his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. As a sculptor, these themes are played out in the flesh, as sub-stance, matter, object, as opposed to the all-too-familiar focus on surface, representation, image. Rosalind turns to the history of classical sculpture in her appropriation of marble and granite as ‘sincere’ materials, and contrasts these with strange, symbolically-laden found-materials, concrete casts of fruit, vegetables and dead birds, aluminium sheets and horse-hair (indicating an indebtedness to the Arte Povera movement, the related work of Antoni Tàpies, and Javier Pérez’s Mask of Seduction). Her liberal use of metallic lead polish, with all its associative connotations of madness and poison, tie all Rosalind’s works together with a muted,

sombre aesthetic in contrast to Dionisia’s heightened, fluorescent palette, although Dionisia’s implemen-tation of cheap, ready-to-hand materials such as house paint, spray paint, fluorescent paint and sticky tape also allude to the work and sensibility of Tàpies

Both these artists capture the temporary and fleeting in material form, whether portraying a spontane-ous and unrepeatable combustion of energy and matter, or the transience of life, beauty and the body. Both use new materials and techniques to convey their vision, and both work with a range of dualities and tensions within their subject matter whether between light and dark, visible and invisible, male and female, life and death, control and chance, or stability and instability. The cultural spirit of Spain has been transported back to Australia and translated through the work of both these artists, generating the spark that fires their rich visions.

Dr Sarah RiceFormer Lecturer, Art Theory, Australian National University.

Images, L-R, Rosalind Lemoh-The Beginning of The World, 25 x 12 x 8cm. Concrete, lead glass, rubber. Dioni Salas Hammer- kA1.9775, 152 x 122cm, oil and acrylic on canvas. Rosalind Lemoh- Breathing You In, 110 x 60 x 13cm, Horsehair, aluminium,concrete and lead. Rosalind Lemoh- Pro Meus Diligo (For My Lover) 650 x 200 x 11cm,Concrete, lead and aluminium.

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