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Created for the ‘Buddha Enlightened 2BE’ international workshop organised by Delhi based artists Sanjeev Sinha and Dianne Hagen. ‘Buddha Enlightened 2BE’ took place in Bodhgaya, Bihar, India in January 2011.
Stupa City is comprised of four sets of works. The starting point is a group of figurative paper collages assembled from the residue of an earlier work (Letters, Lies & Alibis, 2004). The forms of these characters have been increased in scale to form the second set of works, painted onto glass, creating a different sensibility again, where geometric abstraction meets cubist funk.
Award winning piece, created specifically for
the McClelland Sculpture Survey and Award, Victoria.
Six permanent public sculptures commissioned
for COSTCO Wholesale Australia, situated at the foot of the Southern Star Observatory
Wheel in Docklands, Melbourney Wheel in Docklands, Melbourne
Mood Bomb was an exhibition of abstract
oil paintings on (the back of) glass. As the title indicates these works
were conceived intuitively and the paintings themselves ultimately suggested
their own titles. Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne.
Tritonic Jam Session
One of an ongoing series that utilises contemporary
industrial plastic detritus to explore fundamental principles of
modernism such as form, colour and spatiality. Melbourne Prize
for Urban Sculpture 2008, Federation Square, Melbourne.
Studio Floor
Studio Floor was created for the
group exhibition Flash, curated by Geoff Newton and Jan
Duffy, at Linden – St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne.
Square
Square was an exhibition of abstract
canvases at Turner Galleries, Perth, Western Australia.
Created specifically for the 2008 Helen
Lempriere National Sculpture Prize Exhibition, Werribee Mansions,
Victoria
Show Court 3 was a 3-day event which
involved setting up 75 sculptures in a professional outdoor tennis
court. Curated by Jane O’Neill, Rod Laver Arena Complex, Melbourne
Olympic Parks
Created specifically for the 2007 Helen
Lempriere National Sculpture Prize Exhibition, Werribee Mansions,
Victoria
A Bunch of Flowers showcased three distinct
groups of works: the first of many plastic assemblage Jam Session sculptures;
three large bill-board scale Classic Shazzy car/girl collages and several
large abstract collage works.
Up She Goes is a 4-minute video loop
where the hanging of a large collage work (in pieces) is reversed and
sped up, with sound added. Linden – St Kilda Centre for Contemporary
Arts, Melbourne
Letters, Lies & Alibis was
created for the exhibition Non-Stopp, a collaborative
project by Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek and Louise Paramor at Project
Space, RMIT University, Melbourne
FOREVERYOURS is a series of
large collages meticulously assembled using pre-hand-painted gloss
paper, which is cut into numerous shapes and then pasted to form images.
This imagery comprises a variety of over-scaled interpretations of
the Mills and Boon series’ covers.
Off-cuts was an exhibition of the
first in a series of abstract collages constructed from the refuse
of the FOREVERYOURS series of collages. Künstlerhaus Bethanien,
Berlin
Articulated around the theme of eroticism, The
Love Artist presents itself as an installation in three complementary
parts. Breitengraser – room for contemporary sculpture, Berlin.
Made specifically for the exhibition Elvis
Has Just Left the Building, Perth Institute of Contemporary
Art , Western Australia and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin,
curated by Boris Kremer.
Heart-On was an exhibition of honey-comb
paper sculptures, found objects and borrowed text, and was created
during a 3-month residency at IASKA
Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany
Made specifically for the National Sculpture
Prize Exhibition, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Breitengraser – room for contemporary sculpture, BerlinLustgarten was a series of
large-scale ‘honey-comb’ paper sculptures, produced during a one-year Australia
Council Fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany.
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Heart-On
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Heart-On
Heart-On was an exhibition of honey-comb paper sculptures, found
objects and borrowed text, and was created during a 3-month residence
at IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia)
IASKA catalogue text by Boris Kremer:
Such Lush Femininity -On decoration, romance and deceit in the work of Louise Paramor
“Such lush femininity…a cloud of shiny brown curls bouncing around a
soft, beautiful face... skin gleaming like honey satin... an appealing
freshness about her lemon dress which somehow accentuated the sensuality
of full breasts thrusting against it, the seductive sway of perfectly
curved hips, the graceful movement of long legs. Its line of buttons
could open all of her to him...” (1)
Were one to give a style sheet description of Louise Paramor’s latest
works, this might just be the adequate literary style to do so. Ample
bosoms, glistening wet thighs, firm, pear-shaped buttocks; such are the
bodily attributes of Paramor’s “beauties” teasing the viewer in a purposeful
attempt to “send a surge of blood to his loins”. (2)
In 2001, during a three-month-long “outback residency” at the International
Art Space Kellerberrin Australia - IASKA, the Berlin-based, self-proclaimed ”Love
Artist” (3) was to experience an intense feeling of both geographical
and social remoteness. Seeking escape from her isolation, she instinctively
cast herself in the role of an addicted dime novel reader, investigating
the imaginary space of pulp fiction. Having confronted her own reality
with the romanticised ideals that make our wishful dream worlds, she
set out to complete an installation that would visualise these conflicting
realms. Under the tacky headline Heart-On, her exhibition in
the rather conservative Wheatbelt community of Kellerberrin, WA, alternatively
struck the chords of sexual lure and deceit.
While the interior of the exhibition space was concealed covering the
front windows in thick acrylic paint, the show1s apparently sleazy intents,
enshrined in its frivolous title, were boldly marked in gold vinyl lettering
across the entrance. In the locals’ minds, there was little doubt that
this rather “full-on” setting, reminiscent of red light districts the
world over, was geared at luring honest folks with the forbidden promise
of readily available, lascivious sexuality. Once inside, lusting trespassers
would in fact find themselves contemplating rather innocent girlie beach
towels, embroidered with duplicitous quotes borrowed from the popular
Harlequin Mills & Boon novel series. Next to the towels, sombre snake-like
paper objects constructed in delicate honeycomb technique wallowed on
the floor, curling around the large room’s central pillars in what seemed
an horizontal extension of a bulging red lantern cascading from the ceiling.
When faced with Louise Paramor’s whimsical hijacking of popular fiction,
visitors tend to simply interpret her gesture as derisive of a particular
style of representation, one that is commonly regarded as pertaining
to the realm of “low culture”. More accurately, beneath such reductive
reading lurks a world of deception and failure. For when she constructs
decorative environments drawing on corner-shop imagery, Paramor actually
offers a glimpse into her subconscious, and not least ours. Hers is a
longing for a perfect world, yet a longing informed by the intuition
that sweet utopia is just a step short of plain kitsch. Thus, in unearthing
the artist’s personal affections, her constructions manage to unravel
stereotyped underpinnings of social representation at large.
Ultimately, Paramor’s strategies circle around the notion of décor, a
continuously discussed issue in the history of art and its relation to
other disciplines. The exacerbated formalism of the Heart-On display
updated this ongoing debate about shape and content - or form and function,
as it were - by plunging into the marshes of trash vernacular. What,
then, is the function of Paramor’s objects? Interestingly, the presupposed
instrumentality of the beach towels is itself equivocal. Certainly, their
obviously poor quality betrays any effective usage. Does this mean that
their use value is rather contained within the peculiar imagery they
carry? If so, why not go for a poster instead?
Louise Paramor’s mock erotic stage sets highlight the friable status
of these and other found objects by evidencing the semantic cul-de-sac
their all too overt enterprise of seduction is heading for. In their
pleasurable, but nonetheless vain endeavour, the fancy towels and romance
novels use in fact similar mechanisms. Paramor takes their syntactic
redundancy a step further by isolating and recombining their stylised
devices. When linked to the suggestive shapes of three-dimensional, handcrafted
paper sculptures, these reframed artefacts create a physical space where
our clichéd presumptions are exposed in nearly unbearable excess. The
resulting site is a tautological image box, a saturated surface onto
which our hopes and dreams can no longer be projected. Instead of redemptory
bliss, we are left with a contrived glance into the abyss of representation;
an unsuspected insight into the necessary failure of vernacular imagery
as a means to signify our eccentric desires.
Notes:
(1) Emma Darcy, Outback Heat, Harlequin Mills & Boon, Chatswood,
NSW, 1998.
ISBN 0 733 51144 9.
(2) ibid.
(3) The Love Artist is the self-derisory title of Louise Paramor1s 2002
solo exhibition at Breitengraser - room for contemporary sculpture, Berlin.
Heart-on was also shown in 2003 at Project Space, RMIT University,
Melbourne.
Heart-on was reviewed in The Age newspaper.
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