ERASURE

MAZIE TURNER | DAN NELSON | ANNEMARIE MURLAND | KATRINA HOLDEN

17 July - 24 August 2019

Please join us for the opening and performances Tuesday 6 August from 7:30pm. 
Pianist Jacob Neale and bassist Jarrod Gibson will play Jazz in response to the artist’s work and the theme of erasure.

Erasure is never simply a matter of making things disappear: there is always a remainder that comes about in the aftermath, some mark on the surface from which a word or image or note has been removed. Whether crossed out, written-over or rubbed away, the forsaken item has a habit of returning, like a spectre: if only in the marks that assume its place and assert its passing.
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IMAGE ABOVE: Dan Nelson, Fire path 2019, oil on canvas

Please join us for the follow up event and performances Tuesday 13 August from 7:30pm.
Sangria, paella and Flamenco! with Bandaluzia featuring ARIA nominated guitarist Damian Wright, for exceptional Spanish music and dance.
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IMAGE ABOVE: Mazie Turner, Out of Darkness - Violet Cloud 2009, oil on belgian linen, 
152.5 x 183 cm 
Donated by the artist to the University of Newcastle Collection through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

During the 1960s, a growing number of artists and writers in different locations around the world and largely unaware of one another, adopted the process of erasure and effacement. In New York, Doris Cross started painting over dictionary pages; Tom Phillips in London began to partially obliterate pages from an obscure Victorian novel; the Austrian concrete poet, Gerhard Rühm used India ink to largely obliterate a newspaper and in Belgium in 1968, Marcel Broodthaers crossed out selected words in a painting that resembled a blackboard.

​ Erasure was just one of a number of methods used by Conceptual artists in the 1960s, and was frequently employed to break with tradition and instigate new forms of art making that appeared to be detached from the artist’s own hand. But perhaps the most famous artwork featuring the act of erasure is Robert Rauschenberg’s work, ‘Erased De Kooning Drawing’, 1953. Since then, many artists have reprised Rauschenberg’s influential act of erasure, imbuing it with different meanings, created primarily through the question of what is being erased, as well as the circumstances under which such a cancellation is performed. Erasure is an exhibition of four women artists who have used and continue to interrogate this strategy in their work.

IMAGE ABOVE: Annemarie Murland, Erasure 2# 2019, mixed media

IMAGE ABOVE: Katrina Holden, Kinship 2019, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 51 cm