Event Type: Solo
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Exhibition: To Do
A review
by Chloé Wolifson
Gail Hastings’ major new work Exhibition: To Do is anchored around a large square plywood structure that sits on the earth’s axis – the walls respectively facing north, south, east and west.
The visitor is invited to enter the structure, also entitled Exhibition: To Do, via an opening in its eastern wall. This has the effect of placing the viewer at the centre of Hastings’ universe. The surrounding construction is an assemblage of partitions of varying height, which expand incrementally and symmetrically on the pre-existing dimensions of the plywood (18 millimetres thick).
Only once standing inside the work, Exhibition: To Do, can the visitor view three works on paper created specifically to sit inside the structure. Hastings’ two-dimensional works appear to act as blueprints or drafts for the sculptural components of the artist’s practice, both in the sense of their execution but also their subject matter.
Delicately rendered in watercolour with ruled pencil lines emerging from the edges of the translucent wash, these pieces depict the To Do list in question. One such reminder, the instruction: ‘Build racks in which to store the art after the exhibition’, speaks volumes about the established systems of the art world, and the particular approach artists must take when they create work which sits outside the conventionally commercial.
Exhibition: To Do is grounded in an awareness of space. It is a show which, while rooted in existing patterns and geometries, maintains a sense of humanity and emotion within each ruled, sawed, sanded and watercoloured line.
Excerpt from Chloé Wolifson, ‘Gail Hastings – Exhibition: To Do’, in Deborah Stone (ed.), Visual Arts Hub: Reviews, 2014, http://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/visual-arts/exhibition-to-do-243240, accessed 23 September 2016.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
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Sydney Contemporary 13
It is with great pleasure that The Commercial Gallery announces it now represents Gail Hastings and will present a solo exhibition of her work at the inaugural Sydney Contemporary art fair between 19 and 22 September at Carriageworks, Sydney (Booth PC102). It is exciting to be showing new work by this important mid-career Australian artist at what will be the first presentation for the gallery at an art fair.
Press Release: The Commercial Gallery
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Space you can’t sit on: The space in Today
Half exhibition, half archival room – this exhibition presents a number of sculptuations that focus on the creation of space. The exhibition’s title refers, in part, to an included work in which the spatially isolated letters of the word ‘today’ invoke a daily fragmentation that nevertheless come together as one in the end – as ‘Today’. Called a sculptuation, these watercolour floorplans appear, at first, to be far from ‘sculptural’. Yet a sculptuation consists not of solid but of spatial objects that we, admittedly, cannot sit on but which, nevertheless, are just as concrete in guiding the passage of our day.
Gail Hastings, exhibition statement, October 2011
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Encounter: Stephen Sinn
In this exhibition there is one work, ‘encounter: Stephen Sinn’. The word ‘encounter’ surfaced during discussion after Fr Steve spent some very long moments silently looking at the work for the first time. For him, the term tended to encapsulate not only the movement happening in the work, but its parallel with what was most meaningful for him in his work with others, especially the homeless – the encounter. It is, as he describes it, the heroic dignity of street people that takes his breath away every day and gives him breath: where it is this encounter that forms him, that makes him Stephen Sinn.
Gail Hastings, exhibition statement, June 2011
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Leave the line standing
After much squabbling over how best to cut the piece of wood, with jigsaw in hand I decided to ignore Mick and get on with the job as I always do — uncomfortable with his audience but, nevertheless — when Mick made a last ditched effort and said, ‘leave the line standing’. Standing? Line? I put down the jigsaw and added ‘baffled’ to annoyed and uncomfortable. I asked what he meant. ‘You either cut the line off or leave the line standing’. Suddenly I realised there was no line standing between us, we had been saying the same thing, just differently. I had been building a wall at the time. When, months later, I came to exhibit my art in the same room, our agreement seemed the right type of line to leave standing.
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Sculptural Situations: Gail Hastings
Perth born Hastings is a singular artist distinguished by the extraordinary focus of her practice. … Consistently describing her work as ‘a space made for others’ Hastings creates what she calls ‘invisible architectures’ that invite the viewer to enter a dialogue with what they observe. … As ‘the artist’ Hastings eschews a central position in her work in order to vacate this space for the viewer. … she has invited PICA’s Director Amy Barrett-Lennard and Curator Melissa Keys to contribute a collection of novels to this iteration of her work, further disorienting and de-stabilising the impulse to search for authorial essential meaning.
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But is it art?
As in a detective story, or the scene of a crime, everything is primed or poised for meaning. That corridor to the library and that picture on the wall: everything in the mystery seems chosen, asking us why it is there. Everyone becomes a suspect. We bring our private eyes along and take partial views of the whole. In the meantime we interview eyewitnesses, flick through art catalogues, and try to second-guess the spooks. It’s an environment of suspicion, and we have to read between the lines. It’s a bit like our current political situation, a culture of duplicity … . Along the way Hastings calls our attention to art. To the status of the art object as material and on our own processes of production and reception.
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mission: untitled (blue)
It used to be said of experimental art that it didn’t really need an audience to view it…. Experimentation for its own sake was to be sufficient … Of course this was before — or despite — some people reckoning that the value of art was actually something produced in the exchange between artists and audience, in between the work being made and being received. So, they argued, there really isn’t a work until that happens, since the work of art is that happening. … Gail Hastings’ work frames similar questions … or really, as she says it ‘sets a scene’ — for generating a kind of self-consciousness about looking at art …
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Gail Hastings: Sculptural Situation 1989–2000
Included sculptuations:
a sculptural situation to enter, and to leave, 2000
a sculptural situation, drawn in, 2000
a sculptural situation’s architectonic colour-space, 2000
Encyclopaedia of possibilities: Mon 14.9.95, 1995
magazine – mission: untitled (blue), 1999
Movie directions for secret agents, 1994
pattern book five, 1996
poster: a sculptural situation (drawn in), 2000
stare two, 1997
untitled (with kitten), 1989
untitled (with magazine), 1989
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apparently not
The Director said, ‘action’, he acted, he said ‘apparently not’, then the Director said, ‘cut’.
This ‘take’ was done 10 times. Then, at night for ten nights, he dreamt each take in detail.
One take was selected and the movie completed.
For ten weeks the movie was shown at the movie house in his nome town. For ten weeks the movie was then shown in ten other towns.
He counted the times that is one appearance on film was repeated.
He likened the repetition to a patter, a lattice, in which was meshed all of the unfixed moments of his days and nights.
Feeling alienated by the pattern’s netting effect, its reduction, he spoke to a finer. The friend advised he treat the pattern as a fabric that he could fold this way or that. He folded his fabric and left it behind the red patterned screen while he appeared in 10 more movies.
He wondered if anyone noticed, then happily said to himself, ‘apparently not’. -
art idea no. 8,582,048
Hastings takes up artistic idioms and presentational forms of conceptual art and charges them sensually. She combines conceptual strategies with the language and aesthetics of action-related, factual texts … and stages these through the employment of a markedly material aesthetics. Her art opens up a dialogue on the origins, significance and function of ‘works’ and hands over the responsibility for the open ‘product’ of reflection and action to the viewer.
For her most recent work … [t]wo square white seats, formally referring to the classical works of Minimal Art, are positioned so that viewers see each other through the missing centre of the object. … One of the patterns is repeated in an accompanying photocopy as the fabric of a dress worn by the artist Varvara Stepanova, a protagonist of the Russian avant-garde whose textile designs, typographical sketches and spatial constructions were among the pioneering achievements of her time.
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art idea no. 8,582,048
Hastings takes up artistic idioms and presentational forms of conceptual art and charges them sensually. She combines conceptual strategies with the language and aesthetics of action-related, factual texts … and stages these through the employment of a markedly material aesthetics. Her art opens up a dialogue on the origins, significance and function of ‘works’ and hands over the responsibility for the open ‘product’ of reflection and action to the viewer.
For her most recent work … [t]wo square white seats, formally referring to the classical works of Minimal Art, are positioned so that viewers see each other through the missing centre of the object. … One of the patterns is repeated in an accompanying photocopy as the fabric of a dress worn by the artist Varvara Stepanova, a protagonist of the Russian avant-garde whose textile designs, typographical sketches and spatial constructions were among the pioneering achievements of her time.
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To make a work of timeless art
A watercolour page from the Encyclopaedia of Timeless Art is first seen intact on the exhibition announcement card posted to regular gallery visitors prior to the exhibition. The page slips from the vertical plane of 2D to the horizontal plane of 3D.
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To make a work of timeless art
A watercolour page from the Encyclopaedia of Timeless Art is first seen intact on the exhibition announcement card posted to regular gallery visitors prior to the exhibition. The page slips from the vertical plane of 2D to the horizontal plane of 3D.
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rule c: Remember, the aesthetic outcome of this exercise is purely due to chance and circumstance. It bears no reflection on you, personally.
rule b: Upon the conclusion of your endeavour, title and date this form appropriately: not without, however, the promise that whilst the outcome might be baffling, that the process was — at least — truthful to, and trustful of, the moment. …
rule c: Remember, the aesthetic outcome of this exercise is purely due to chance & circumstance. It bears no reflection on you, personally; and the outcome will little change a moment’s collection, nor heartbeat, generally.
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Belles-lettres
Belles-lettre is a project consisting of separate installations by three artists, Maureen Burns, Gail Hastings and Virginia Ward. Based in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth respectively, each has devised a site-specific work for ACCA which explores new definitions of sculpture and the relationships between object, text and space. The ephemeral nature of the communications — both textural and spatial — connects the three installations in belles-lettres, which individually explore cultural terrains and practises.
Media Release, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 6 August 1993
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