CATALOGUE ESSAY

PRIMARY SOURCES

In the fourteen drawings that comprise Steven Asquith’s Storm Concepts, sensation, not reportage, is the stimulant here: the ‘drug of choice’. In his jettisoning of any traditional construction of a tempesttossed landscape or an idealised elysian breadth and immensity, Asquith conjures up a multi-layered experience of space and place, perhaps more ‘states of mind’, apprehended at street level. These works each record multiple, mutable perceptions snagged on momentary chance encounters with highly volatile forces - at speed. Caught in the intervals between billboards, buildings, walls and wires... is this New York? Melbourne? London? Or Kabul Wherever?... Ornate scars accumulate and leave their tracks. Storm front time bomb; Can’t you see I have something in my eye; Holding pattern; Blue cover strategy: these titles lead away from idealised constructs of landscape as ‘picturesque sublime’. Asquith’s ‘storms’ play as metaphor for other violent disturbances, created through human agency, here on ‘planet artefact’. In these images landscapes become, simply, ‘zones’.

In this way the artist positions us within his universe, confronting the locus of a storm. In each work the churning, dark storm-fronts, like a shadow play delirium, provide a scaffolding across which cosmological phenomena as substantial as dreams drift and refract. The image of an arm with its ‘spray-pac’ extension epitomises the immediacy, the informality, and even the intimacy of the act of drawing. Mythic, improvised landscapes are here conjured through visible actions: traces of traverse. In The Fall and Peacock Delivery, with their dimensions assuming a more human scale, a peripatetic body-rhythm maps out a record of event and process. The guide map, however, is provisional and seems forever incomplete. An accumulation of details: prismatic colour and forms, signs and objects, memories and narratives cluster and disperse like broken contrails strung across space, defining a terrain with all the substance of smoke.

In each work Asquith gathers in and distils, from ordinary epiphanies, the sensations of ‘weather’ and ‘place’; an accumulation of ephemeral impressions iridescent, and melancholy. Captured in the vandalizing gestures of a low-level street sign-language, the artist ‘acts out’ another familiar terrain, registering ‘firstperson’ sensations as he tracks a regular circuit around and across Melways Map 58. Here, within each scribing gesture, inside every reverie, lies a record of lived temporality; an exhilarating, fluid, almost incandescent collision of forces: Storm front time bomb, and Like a gold circle avalanche b4 the death chamber.

There is an anarchy here, too, in the works’ repeated gestures; a release of energy which summons a series of formal ‘rituals’ emerging as phosphorescent marks, mutable, shimmering picto-gramatic and layered fragments whose transparency heralds a shift in prevailing conditions, and another approaching shockwave storm front. In each of the works, the floating cross-out, the sign of erasure, suggests we might be peering through rainbow-coloured ‘fractalising’ lenses directly into the eye of the storm itself. In Voodoo man the storm looks back at us.

The relatively modest scale of the drawings, and the insistent, narrow verticality of defining the ‘point of view’, compress an unpredictable and moody sensation of a sublime ‘weather drenched’ state. The proportions of scale and the sense of a partial or obscured vision suggest that we are receiving only a fragmentary glimpse of a small part of some other, horizonless, world. Behind the ‘stratigraphic’ superstructure of the visual events confined within their narrow portals, we squint at a celestial light beyond: a void opening up to an infinite depth. There is no horizon in sight to secure one’s bearings, or footing; only a spatial instability and dynamism applies.

There is a wild kind of romanticism inherent in these works, kindled along the kinetic border-zone between intense, physical action and the reveries of the imagination.

The informality and very portability of the media employed, spray paint, chalk-board enamel, paint markers, provide a speedy, loaded, street-born visual lexicon: a kind

of ‘image anarchy’ functioning as an armature for multiple sensory illusions that cluster, shimmer and fragment back into the white-hot ether of the void. Within each gesture, each flick and squirt, each embroidered cartoon-fantasy-beaded-strand, incandescent symbol and tattooed porous net, lies a record of a lived temporality: primary source, in a time of ambivalence.

Janenne Eaton, July 2010

Janenne Eaton is an artist and Head of Painting at Victorian College of the Arts & Music

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REVIEWS

THE AGE A2 Saturday August 14, 2010

WHAT Steven Asquith: Storm Concepts

WHERE Utopian Slumps, 33 Guildford Lane, Melbourne, utopianslumps.com

Steven Asquith’s Storm Concepts seem to represent an exchange between history and methodology. While rooted in an altogether dissimilar aesthetic, materiality and palette, the thought behind the Melbourne artist’s series of 14 new drawings seems genuinely contiguous with the landscape tradition. Creating his “clouds” via raw gestures of blackboard enamel spray paint, only to render their expanse with meticulous layers of colour pencil and Posca pen markings, Asquith’s works are cacophony of synthetic tones and textures. Streams of multicoloured rain fall amid lashings of polluted fluorescence; swarms of black clouds entrap webs of fragile colour. The resonance here is psychological as much as it is geographic. Indeed, while one could dismiss his use of materials as a kind of “dude-ist” affectation,

Asquith’s spray pack and Posca pens aren’t chosen lightly. When we consider the contemporary realities of the polluted, synthetic, urban landscape, these materials seem far more relevant than paint and brush. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until August 28.

Dan Rule

BROADSHEET

Steven Asquith: Storm Concepts

Steven Asquith’s new exhibition at Utopian Slumps is a striking melange of earthly chaos.

By Dan Rule, 4th August 2010

Steven Asquith’s series of 14 new drawings hardly espouse a conventional reading of landscape. The black chalkboard enamel ‘storm clouds’, Posca pen ‘fumes’ and tiny pencil-and-ink ‘bubblegum acid rain’ that comprise Storm Concepts paint a tumultuous, abstracted vista of the contemporary experience.

Landscapes, however, they are. “I wanted to use nature as a metaphor for our contemporary psychological states,” says Asquith, one of the founding directors of respected gallery Block Projects. “Each of these little storms are a take on our current environment and nature, but also a reference to the great Western tradition and history of landscape painting and artists like Turner, who would use the skies to display emotional turmoil. By using contemporary materials, this work kind of adapts that idea to evoke the schizophrenic nature of contemporary, urban life.”

It’s a quality that resonates throughout Storm Concepts. Indeed, the strong cloud motifs that dominate Asquith’s works prove far more complex than they first appear. With proximity, layers of intricate pencil webbing and minute ink textures reveal themselves; swirls of colour entrap clusters of Posca markings, revealing – as the artist puts it – “unique psychological and ideological layers.”

But according to Asquith, who has worked with the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in London, Exit Art in New York and co-founded The Ship Gallery artist-run initiative in London, his practice is grounded in a far more primal sensibility. “To me, art’s about what you can do with the things you have in your hands,” he offers. “It’s about mark-making and drawing and painting as much as any other academic idea that’s holding it all together. Art exists in the alchemy between the artist and the materials. It’s about the variation in the mark-making and drawing and painting as much as any other academic idea that’s holding it all together.”

Steven Asquith’s Storm Concepts opens this Thursday evening at Utopian Slumps and runs until August 28.

broadsheet.com.au/steven-asquith-storm-concepts

ARTINFO.COM.AU

Opinion: Steven Asquith-Storm Concepts

by Robert Hollingworth

Steven Asquith Storm Concepts 6 – 28h August, 2010

Utopian Slumps, 33 Guildford Lane, Melbourne

As the title suggests Steven Asquith’s new show alludes to landscape and the weather – but not literally. Asquith seems to draw inspiration less from darkening skies and more from the idea of them – he is an urban artist, not a landscape painter – and his blackened clouds seem more like metaphors than marvels of nature. Storms insinuate themselves into our lives and weathering them is what we do; we prepare for change, for inclemency, for a sudden deluge of… of something.

Yet this series of works on paper is hardly threatening but more a reflection on life at street level, nested in overhead wires, flanked by glass and rendered brick invariably tagged; a habitat as natural to us as ice to an Icelander. We live with the forces of social change and we experience our storms amid an amalgam of acrylic and steel, cell phones and TV, signs and signifiers.

To render this, aerosol spray, paint marker and coloured pencil seems logical, and with them Asquith produces structured, highly resolved images as sensitive as a Constable or a Corot. But where these artists looked for nuance in a weather-altered expanse with man writ small, Asquith delicately adorns an environment transformed by culture. This ‘landscape’ used to be called second nature, now it’s just life, and the difference between 19th century plein air painting and Asquith’s Storm Front Time Bomb is the passage of time, changed circumstances, altered habitats, new concepts.

Asquith has his own idiosyncratic way of doing things and in a burgeoning art scene where so much looks like a version of what we saw last time, this is refreshing indeed.

http://www.artinfo.com.au/opinions/read/steven-asquith-storm-concepts