Artist Feature / 02
Ella Fleck reflects on looking and processing the visual world through the practice of three Australian artists, Samraing Chea, Emily Dober, and Alan Constable.
Samraing Chea, Eternal Sky Wind with Beauty Plants, 2012, pencil on paper, 19 × 23.5 cm, Private collection. Photo: Andrew Curtis.
Looking feels different today than it did a year ago, it seems my eyes are wearier of screens. I spend my days in lockdown yo-yoing between the digital media of strangers, my friends and family - videos, photos, texts. I both desperately avoid and obsessively read about NFTs online - scared and enchanted by the apparent dematerialising of my world. My life is a backlit groundhog day of jpegs, mp4s and zoom calls. There’s nothing else to do all day except look: look up at the sky, look out the window, look at my computer, look down at my hands. Sometimes looking feels tired, sometimes it feels expansive: weightless and heavy, mediated, compressed, magical. Here, I gather together the works of three artists whose pictures and artworks inspire fantasy in me when I look at them, and whose work is about a type of looking many of us can relate to right now: mediated.
Samraing Chea (b. 1995, Cambodia) is an emerging artist living in Melbourne. Working primarily in coloured pencil and graphite, Chea draws documentary-style images paired with captions. Taking a format that mimics a series of imaginary screengrabs, Chea’s work often evokes a dreamy balminess underpinned by a tense, dark and funny caption or content. As compositions they could be diagrams or pictures we might see accompanying an article online or on tv; An Mother Elephant Giving Birth whan a baby came out of the body (2013) storyboards the bloody birth of a baby elephant from the vagina of a mother elephant. Eternal Sky Wind with Beauty of Plants (2012) sees a pixelated gust of petals and pollen pencil-drawn into irregular shapes against a true blue sky. My favourite title, When Teenage Boys wonder out through the Forest at night The Wolves bite them and scratches their Bodies (2017), illustrates a scene as beautiful and trippy as its name. It is at once romantic, hypnotic, ominous and playfully innocent. Chea’s pencil marks are pulpy and human, taking an array of images that feel digital from the hard screen to the soft hand through the warm retina of his living eye.
Samraing Chea, When Teenage Boys wonder out through the Forest at night, The Wolves bite them and scratches their Bodies, 2017, pencil on paper, 25 × 35 cm, Private collection
Emily Dober Not titled 2018 acrylic, collage, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm,
Private collection
Emily Dober (b. 1992, Melbourne) paints and illustrates figurative pictures, often of womxn or things related to womxn. Her inky and bright hand imagines people like models, anime characters (like Sailor Moon), Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and dancers as elements of a picture. She pulls figures from the shiny pop-universe of magazines, tv shows and online articles into watery, pigmented and blushing compositions, snatching them from in front of the camera lens and snapping them to the skin of her painting. Dober’s work floats these figures amongst her own mark-making, repurposing them playfully in palettes of pinks, oranges and purples. They are bright and joyous, an honest celebration of form and figure that spins painterly gestures with poses of her subjects. Like Chea, Dober’s drawings shift the focus of reference from digital imagery to a more analog form, making them undoubtedly relevant to our experience of media during this pandemic.
(left) Sailor Moon a Japanese shōjo manga series written and illustrated by Naoko Takeuchi from the 1990s. (right) Emily Dober Sailor Moon 2015 ink and watercolour on paper, 38 x 28 cm, Private collection
On the other side of photography is Australian artist Alan Constable, whose work concerns the tools we use to produce the images we look at. Constable (b. 1956, Melbourne) is known for rendering cameras as hand-made ceramic objects. Using bright and lucious glazes on his clay, his cameras are enmeshed with and embellished by his own hand, fingerprints, nail impressions and skinfolds. Often still featuring a usable viewfinder (a playful little hole you can look through), his camera’s inspire a reflection on our picture taking habits. Cumbersome, heavy objects, they are a universe away from the slender smartphones we use to document so many of our memories today. Though these cameras are technically useless (still, solid things with no mechanics inside and unpushable buttons), their plump and fleshy tactility is instantly magnetic, drawing viewers into the spirit of taking pictures with their imaginations.
While I can only look at these works from behind my laptop screen today, I am looking forward to a time when I can visit them in person. There is of course no substitute to seeing Alan Constable’s finger impressions or Emily Dober’s pencil marks in the physical world. For now I suppose we have to submit to the compression of jpegs, but we can also ride off the spirit of these works and pick up some clay or a pencil ourselves. Drawing is a way of seeing afterall.
Alan Constable, Untitled, 2014, glazed earthenware, 10 x 21.5 x 12 cm, Private collection
Ella Fleck is an artist and writer currently based in Derbyshire U.K. Working often with people, performance and play, her work considers different ways to nurture, protect and encourage experimentation and autonomy through art practice using gesture, world building and ideas surrounding digital tools. Ella co-founded and is facilitating DARP (Derbyshire Artist Resident Program) an open system for co-creation, autonomy, experimentation and learning through empathy, play and cohabitation. In 2018 she co-founded 650mAh in Hove, U.K, a project space working with experimental artists from different disciplines. She is a part of the Whistlegraph project and is 50% of @ellaandJaana on OnlyFans. In May 2021, she will perform Dating Sim, a live one-on-one performance game at RAFLOST Festival in Iceland.
Samraing Chea, Emily Dober and Alan Constable are artists supported by the studio Arts Projects Australia.
_
© Images copyright the artist unless otherwise stated.
Images courtesy Arts Project Australia, Melbourne.
Banner image: Samraing Chea, When Teenage Boys wonder out through the Forest at night, The Wolves bite them and scratches their Bodies, 2017, pencil on paper, 25 × 35 cm, Private collection