Live at the Museum is Public Delivery’s next big project, done together with Andre Hemer. It is an international performance project and an on-going series of video works. So far it has been shot in various locations on four different continents.

More information next month, stay tuned!

Happy Xmas! We already posted about André Hemer’s catalogue hyper/links earlier, and now uploaded it for you, for free.

Hyper/links was published to document Hemer’s self-titled exhibition featuring QR codes in 2011 at The Physics Room in Christchurch, New Zealand. It has texts by Stephen Cleland and Creon Upton and comes in an edition of 300.

If you want to buy the printed catalogue, you can order it here on Public Delivery, it’s just €11.50 (~$15) including shipping worldwide.

(click above to enlarge)

Rita Angus (1908–1970) was one of the leading figures in twentieth century New Zealand art. Her 1936 painting Cass was voted New Zealand’s Greatest Painting in a 2006 poll and is part of the Christchurch Art Gallery’s collection.

Some weeks ago, André Hemer opened his solo exhibition CASS at the Christchurch Art Gallery, particularly referencing to the work by Angus through a many-dimensioned installation, consisting of more than 50 iterations of the original Cass artwork. CASS combines painting with a range of secondary outputs to play with ideas of distance, deletion and dislocation. Images of Cass abound throughout the real and virtual worlds, ranging from high-quality, legitimate reproductions to cropped, blurred and otherwise corrupted versions. Sampling freely from conventional and new media sources, and adding his own interpretations to the mix, Hemer emphasises the sense of separation these endlessly multiplied facsimiles create, relating it to the physical inaccessibility of Cass itself, currently stored within the earthquake-closed Christchurch Art Gallery building.

André Hemer – Hot Wallpapers (at Antoinette Godkin Gallery)

André Hemer – Hot Wallpapers (at Antoinette Godkin Gallery)

André Hemer – Hot Wallpapers (at Antoinette Godkin Gallery)

André Hemer – wallpaper_03 (hot wallpapers), 2012, 140cm × 125cm, Acrylic and pigment on canvas

André Hemer – wallpaper_012 smudged, 2012, 41.3cm × 36.3cm, Digital pigment prints on Harman gloss fibre-based paper

André Hemer – wallpaper_05 smudged, 2012, 41.3cm × 36.3cm, Digital pigment prints on Harman gloss fibre-based paper

André Hemer – wallpaper_05 smudged, 2012, 41.3cm × 36.3cm, Digital pigment prints on Harman gloss fibre-based paper

Android 4.1 – Jelly Bean wallpapers

ABOUT HOT WALLPAPERS

Shortly after completing his solo show at one of New Zealand’s most important non-commercial art spaces, the Christchurch Art Gallery, Sydney based artist André Hemer is showing his new series Hot Wallpapers at Antoinette Godkin Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand.

The exhibited prints and paintings are based on wallpapers of the new version of Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, and like much of Hemer’s recent work, use an archive of widely shared and recognisable images. By attempting to entrap these digital artefacts in another kind of viewing screen by turning them into physical objects, he is increasing the inherently short lifespan of the digital artefacts and touches on the contemporary psyche of aesthetic disposability.

The exhibition opened on 14 November and runs until 08 December, 2012.

André Hemer about Hot Wallpapers

“Basically, you go to the root of memory, and it’s all about interaction with found documents – look at how you acquire language. You mirror the environment around you. That’s what sampling does – it’s a process of recall that changes memory as you recall it.” —DJ Spooky

The works created in Hot Wallpapers began with a downloaded set of wallpapers taken from a popular tablet device released in 2012. Designed to be used as an official preloaded wallpaper set for a Google Nexus 7 Tablet, these default images have become widely shared and recognisable; an aesthetic shared as part of a collective memory.

Akin to its physical fore bearer, a digital wallpaper covers the pixelated walls of an electronic device. When graphic aesthetics are aligned to a certain type of brand, device, or model they inevitably follow the societal fashion of that device. At first graphically signifying the newest and hottest and then over time coming to embody the outmoded. Thus for devices which are ubiquitous and otherwise generic in appearance, alternative wallpapers can become a type of personal customization.

The images themselves are released by Google- designed by illustrators or designers with the intent of creating a visual branding for the device. They vary in their appearance, although there are some commonalities- a shared mix of simple hues, a bevy of gradient fades, and some geometric designs to give the screen an appearance of depth and optical play. Rather than being memorable because of a perceived uniqueness or originality- the images bear visual notoriety as freely shared and distributed files existing on millions of devices. The replication of image producing an aesthetic mark on the collective memory of the present. Certain images could be mistaken for bad renditions or reproductions of geometric abstraction or colour-field painting, while others are hopelessly visually tied to a sci-fi utopia.

The lifespan for a digital artefact is inherently shorter than that of any physical object. An electronic device has a longevity measured in months, not years. An image which is associated or tied to such a device will undoubtedly share a similar fate. What happens to sentimentality in this scenario? What happens when an image is lost into the digital ephemera? After all, a digital image does not and never did, exist as an object in the world. But what happens if we do translate and transform these images into objects?

By making these digital images into objects- both printed and painted, I am attempting to entrap them in another kind of viewing screen. The objects become framed akin to a wallpaper contained by the bevel of an electronic device. Some explicitly refer to the desktop picture by repeating a sampled pattern to fill the screen. Other images are interfered with in their various translations through mediums- purposefully sampling- or shifting completely from the initial source, to become works in a painting paradigm. Various smudges appear sometimes drawn, and sometimes incidental or as a visual glitch of some kind. The conceptual distinction between sampling, ‘glitching’, and drawing becomes increasingly blurred.

As with much of my recent work, Hot Wallpapers began with the idea of working with an archive of found images. Rather than being location or contextually specific, Hot Wallpapers aims at swinging and hitting a fleeting idea of the universal; the idea that a seemingly arbitrary collection of images can tell us something important about this time and place- both through the content, and the act and process of collection and transaction. I am sampling images, either wholly or through a translation to become something new- to capture or contain an unseen persuasiveness.

Hot Wallpapers is an attempt at creating a show from soon to be discarded parts, touching on the contemporary psyche of aesthetic disposability. It is an attempt at creating meaning through the process of sampling this digital visual diaspora- seeking to locate the conceptual distance between the digital glitch, sampling, and the ambiguity of translation, transformation, and transactions between digital media. In sampling these freely downloadable images I am embracing their lineage and function, as well as providing a new scenario in which they can be considered.

> more about André Hemer
> download press-kit with more images (web version 3mb, print version 37mb)

From today Andre Hemer is showing new paintings at the Melbourne Art Fair, represented by Bartley and Company. The fair runs until Sunday 5 August.

These are some of the new paintings:

On Friday 3 August 2012 11.30am–1pm Hemer participates in the panel discussion “Why Paint?” as part of the official lecture and forum series

Venue: Melbourne Museum Theatre
Title: In this place now … Painting: A discussion of contemporary, post-conceptual painting
Speakers: Jan Bryant (Convener), Rebecca Coates, André Hemer, Ryan Renshaw

The book was published to document Hemer’s exhibition hyper/links featuring QR codes in 2011 at The Physics Room in Christchurch, New Zealand. It features texts by Stephen Cleland and Creon Upton and comes in an edition of 300. More info following.

> order the book by ISBN: 978-0-9876560-1-8 or directly on the Physics Room site for 10US$

UPDATE: see the full version for free

“Bartley + Company Art is pleased to present this new exhibition by Andre Hemer produced over the past few months during his Rita Angus residency in Wellington.

Swag, Smushing, and Nicki Minaj is a new and distinct body of work representing both a continuation and departure from his earlier work. Certainly Andre’s tradition of distinct titles is continued and this title serves to provide a way into the work. Nicki Minaj is a young highly staged hiphop star; swag may refer to what we carry with us and for a painter such as Andre part of that is the history of painting, smushing, a lovely made up word, sounds like smooching. Thus a rich combination of imagery and ideas are suggested and the paintings remix the artist’s response to his world and this moment in time.

What also continues is Andre’s ongoing interest in technology and the computer. He is interested in translations from one medium or technology to another and in the spaces in between, the slippages, mistakes and imperfect representations. However this new body of work marks a departure in that he is no longer making a strict translation from the computer image to a hand-made painting. These paintings are an amalgamation of imagery from lots of different sources, with the computer acting as a filter and tool rather than a sketching pad – with the outcome not known at the outset. The computer allows the artist to explore post-industrial digital image creation playing with the tessellation, replication, distortion and deletion of form. The eight paintings in the exhibition – with the reduction in scale and the use of paper – are also a response to living and working in the Rita Angus cottage in Thorndon.

2011 has been quite a year for Andre: in addition to the Rita Angus residency, he won the Bold Horizons National Contemporary Art Award with a painting based on a QR (quick response) code, a new body of work first shown in a solo exhibition at the Physics Room in Christchurch at the beginning of the year; he also won a commission for a large public wall work for the foyer of the South British building in Auckland. All of this comes on top of study for a PhD at Sydney University. Since completing his Masters at the University of Canterbury in 2006, Andre has won several international artist residencies and exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and in Australia, Korea, Germany and the United Kingdom.”

The works from the exhibition: