News
16.08.08 I Shane Cotton: The Extended Act of Looking
Documenting an exciting new direction in Shane Cotton’s practice, this catalogue was published by Gow Langsford Gallery to coincide with the artist’s solo exhibition at the gallery’s 2008 Melbourne Art Fair stand. Works featured were developed during Cotton’s three month artist’s residency at Artspace in Sydney earlier this year. This limited edition publication contains full colour reproductions of selected works from this series complimented by an insightful essay penned by Artspace Sydney Director, Blair French.
Shane Cotton’s new works…reveal a particular intensity of focus upon the act of looking: an act that involves both visual examination - scrutiny - and imagination. Many of the works, both on paper and canvas, feature a range of outline shapes based on rock outcrops, headlands and stone-walls photographed by Cotton on his wanderings around Sydney's rocky coastal fringes (as well as sourced from landscape features elsewhere). Texture, shape and the projective form of these features assume a new intensity in the works, matching that of the Upoko Tuhituhi - literally 'marked' heads - that Cotton has also continued to work with in a studio above Woolloomooloo Bay on Sydney harbour. With rare but notable exceptions, these works have been stripped of contextualising detail, information or the associative relationships between multiple forms and figures. Instead we are faced with singular forms or shapes—cut-outs of sorts—rendered in black and deep blue and in sharp outline against stark white grounds. Intense, concentrated looking fixes objects and scenes in the mind’s eye. But concentration has its limits, those boundaries beyond which lies excess, a space of blurred certitude, of unconscious rearrangement of stimuli. This is the space of encounter with Cotton's new work.
- Blair French
Shane Cotton; The Extended Act of Looking
Essay by Blair French
Gow Langsford Gallery, 2008
Paperback, 298 x 200 mm
ISBN: 9780958277358
RRP: NZD$29.95 including GST
Limited copies are available from the gallery
15.03.08 I Shane Cotton artist’s residency
Shane Cotton will commence a three month artist’s residency at Artspace, Sydney in April. During his tenure Cotton intends to complete works for exhibition at the Gow Langsford Gallery stand in the Melbourne Art Fair, 30 July-3 August 2008. Artspace supports artists’ research and practice through a comprehensive Studio Residency Program. Hosting visitors from around Australia and the world, Artspace is a key hub for the contemporary art community in Sydney and across New South Wales, fostering dialogue between local artists, writers and curators and their national and overseas counterparts.
Shane Cotton at NBK Berlin
Gallery artists Shane Cotton, Reuben Paterson and John Pule have been invited to exhibit at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, as part of the exhibition Dateline: Contemporary Art of the Pacific Islands. The exhibition, which is a curatorial collaboration between Rhana Devenport of the Govett Brewster Art Gallery and Dr. Alexander Tolnay, director of NBK, will tour Germany and return to New Zealand in 2008.
Exhibition dates at NBK: 7 September -19 October 2007
The City Gallery Kiel: 25 January - 24 March 2008
City Gallery Sindelfingen: 20 April -22 June 2008
Shane Cotton and John Pule: Turbulence 3rd Auckland Triennial 2007
Gallery artists Shane Cotton and John Pule have been announced as participating artists in the upcoming Auckland Triennial. Curated by Victoria Lynn, the Triennial focuses on the effects of the movement of people around the world, "in the spirit of hope and in the spirit of despair, as travellers take a tourist route, immigrants find new homes, and asylum seekers go in search of sanctuary." (Victoria Lynn) The Auckland Triennial opens in March 2007 and will be held across five venues including the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and Artspace.