RSJ Barker

"Untitled garden oct 16", oil on board, 150x150cm

When Andrew Purvis first saw my work for the show he asked me what I was going to title the exhibition. Not
being the sort of artist who is inclined to attempt to reproduce or represent my immediate surroundings in either a realistic, impressionistic, abstract or a surrealistic manner, I inevitably struggle with the concept of naming paintings let alone coming up with “titles” for my exhibitions. However, the nature of the paintings and drawings on display do raise the obvious questions, such as what exactly is it that I’m trying to say…or do? It’s a good question, and worthy of a considered response.

Well it’s a slender connection really but which can be justified by my method of art practice. I don’t like to classify my work along formal lines and I try not to contrive or force imagery. I prefer to let things occur on my canvases and boards naturally or intuitively or with just a little bit of prompting from my own hand. So it’s strange that I actually came up with the idea of the exhibition title well before Andrew even mentioned it. Perhaps it was my fear of knowing that it was going to have to be dealt with at some point anyway that I subconsciously sorted it out well in advance of the starting date. I’d recently acquired a box of 30 faceless wristwatches that I found on the street during a Bondi rubbish throw out. The transient nature of the Eastern Suburbs means there is always people’s detritus out on the streets whenever someone moves house. This discarded box of faceless wristwatches seemed rather odd and sort of precious in a reverse kind of way and immediately suggested the word ‘timelessness’ to me. I took them back to the studio with a view to using them in an artwork somehow. For a long time I was looking for something to do with them but hadn’t really resolved how to incorporate them into a work. So, in the end I just left them alone and went back to working with my paintings, collages, drawings and assemblages.

Untitled-landscape feb oil on board 150 x 150cm (sold)

I’d been doing some representational work, landscapes, still life, narrative paintings, but became bored with the
idea of painting “things”. It seemed like just pure exercise to me after a while, and analogous to doing push ups
with the view that it’s going to turn you into an elite athlete. In the meantime I’d become fascinated with all these piles of trash and junk that I’d regularly see around the streets where I live. I’d go out looking for little treasures or odds and ends that I may or may not use in an artwork. I loved the way some of them were stacked up in the street or the nature strip. They looked really quite thoughtful and beautiful in the way they had been arranged. They brought to mind installations by artists like Joseph Beuys, Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg or Adrian Hall, to name a few. The problem however, was that recently I’ve been more into painting in oils or acrylics or working on paper, but I wanted to work out how to bring these elements together, discarded junk and traditional materials. I couldn’t find a way to reconcile the two. I wasn’t going to sit down in front of the piles of junk and try to draw or paint them or drag it all back into my 8 x 4 by two-bit* studio. I could have photographed them but for some reason I kept losing cameras or the camera would just break down at the crucial moment.

untitled garden 15 oil-on-board 150x150cm

Anyway, around the middle of last year (2007) I was out in my backyard at dusk where I found myself gazing at a different kind of throw out, this time a compost of discarded dead leaves and bracken in my own backyard. I placed my hands over my eyes and cropped my vision to form a makeshift viewing frame - like a photographer might do when setting up a shot - I realised how perfect this simple heap of leaves and twigs really was. When I went back into my 8 x 4 x two bit studio later I approached my works-in-progress with an entirely different attitude which I believe evokes what I’d seen in the backyard earlier.

Much much later, back in the studio again and staring at yet another batch of newly incomplete paintings for about four hours or so, as you do, with my unresolved wristwatch objects laid out on my workbench, I began to wonder how something so common and plain as a pile of dead leaves and debris could offer so much, and provoke such a complex range of thoughts and questions about life, death, art, artlessness, time and…….timelessness. Voila!
Thankyou.

rsjbarker May 2008

untitled landscape may, oil-on-board, 150x150cm

printed exhibition invitation

The paintings for this exhibition had been built up over a long period of time. Sometimes several paintings have been produced and even exhibited, prior to arriving at the finished state that you see here.

This was my first exhibition at the rex livingston contemporary fine art space in Chippendale. The exhibition went well and plenty of people attended the opening night. The best feature of this gallery was its street frontage. Thousands of vehicles would have driven by the shop on the way to work and seen the exhibits clearly displayed in the front window which was only about 2 metres away from the curbside of busy abercrombie street. I always felt that commuters who got stuck in traffic jams there probably wouldn’t mind to much and would at least be distracted enough to take their mind off of the jam they were in. I’m sure that the owner picked up a lot of business from those traffic jams.

"Untitled 5", oil on board. 2002

"Untitled 2", oil on board. 2002

This gallery was located in the Haymarket next door to the Capitol Theatre. It was a double fronted shopfront with a high ceiling and north facing windows. My exhibition for Gallery 19 comprised of 50 drawings and paintings many of which were based on urban and rural landscapes combined with a series of images based on the theme of St Francis of Asissi.

"Untitled - St Francis of Assisi at the Memorial's Doors, Hyde Park", acrylic and ink on paper 148.5mm x 210.0mm

As well as being the patron saint of animals, St Francis is also considered to be the patron saint of artists. St Francis’ concept of re-creating nativity scenes while modifying his own life in order to reflect that of the life of Chris are considered to be amongst the first recorded evidence of installation or early forms of performance art.

"Untitled - St Francis of Assisi - paddington", acrylic and ink on paper 148.5mm x 210.0mm

In 1996 I held a solo exhibition at a gallery that had been setup by a friend who’d asked me if I’d like to contribute. The gallery was set up at the back of the Paddington Hotel.

"Marlene", acrylic and ink on paper. Exhibition invitation for Back Bar Gallery Paddington 1996

The section of the hotel where the gallery was is now the bottleshop. It was quite a small place with a bar down the middle and so it didn’t take much to make the space look like it was really crowded. The exhibition consisted of fifty A5 (145mm x 210mm) drawings that were produced in sketch books over the previous years.

Untitled - Archibald Fountain Study - 1993

This exhibition included not only images of the area around Darlinghurst, but also a selection of images that utilised digital technology combined with traditional painting such as that used in the exhibition’s invitation image. The title of the exhibition “Faith Error Stack” was a reference to error message that was generated by the printer when an incorrect file had been sent to the network and could not be printed, which resulted in the header on the error message reading Faith: - a reference to the title of the image titled Faith, Error: a reference that there was an error in the system and Stack: a reference to the way in which the printer handled the file. After that line “Faith Error Stack” the printer would then generate pages and pages of binary code.

Untitled-Man Chasing Hat 1993

The exhibition also included a range of landscape drawings and  a smattering of images that crossed over from the previous Gallery 19 Exhibition of St Francis of Assisi images that had been re-worked.

Landscape with Church 1994

SMH article by Bronwyn Watson

I became involved with the setting up of ROM Gallery in 1993 when I was asked, along with Simeon Nelson, by Rosemary Luker and Gregory Smilth to be the inaugural artists. The Gallery was situated in the top right hand corner on the first floor of a warehouse building that occupied an entire block in Taylor Square. My experience at running galleries along with Gregory’s practical skills and Rosemary Luker’s marketing expertise - Rosemary was the marketing manager for the MCA for a few years - ensured the venture would be a success. Below is a Sydney Morning Herald review ROM Gallery’s first ever exhibition.

The exhibition consisted of approximately 100 drawings pinned to a plasterboard wall. The drawings were all representations of local and fictional scenes. As the title suggests and as the reviewer describes, I was simply recording anything that was going on around me at the time.

In fact at the time I had become increasingly involved with computers by that stage. By 1993 I had already had a solid 10 years working with computers in both the Macintosh and PC environments.

"Untitled - Memorial 1", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

For some reason I had decided that I no longer wanted to rely or even consider computers or software to generate artwork and that I really wanted to return to the traditional materials of painting and drawing. This exhibition was really a reaction to the use of technology I’d been using over the previous decade. A realisation that technology was not an end in itself but merely a means to an end. I decided to abandon all technology for the exhibition except for the marketing and database management and simply pinned the drawings to the wall.

"Untitled - Memorial 4", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

The idea seemed popular and the traffic to and from in the weeks following was very busy. The review above states 96 works were on exhibition, however there were  more smaller exhibits within the gallery and portfolios also on display. My notion that I was going to deny myself the use of technology for creative art purposes was soon thrown out of the window once the internet started to take off not long afterwards with the release of the Mosaic Web Browser.

The reviewer suggests that I’m a human scanner that sucks up imagery and spits it out in the form on works on paper. In fact I have a bit of a problem with that interpretation. I’m not sure if I suggested that to the reviewer and if I did - and it’s possible - I regret it.  It seemed sort of a pretentious idea to me even at the time it was published. That’s the problem with the print media. Once it’s printed it’s set in stone. Publish or be damned. Exhibit or be damned is just as valid for an artist.

"Untitled - Memorial 3", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

But just around the corner, while nobody’s looking up pops the internet. In a way this had an even more withdrawing effect on my art. While I’d absorbed the practical marketing and information possibilities of the internet I’d still not been completely convinced by digital technologies ability to deliver art.

"Untitled - Memorial 2", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

Over the following years however as I again became increasingly preoccupied with computer technologies again, I began to allow it to creep gradually back into my work for both practical and artistic reasons. Some of the ways in which the technology emerges however is not by design or intention.