JOHN BARBOUR TRIBUTE (A Bibliography for Bees)
3 August - 3 September 2006
Tricoleur for a Total War [2006]
image courtesy the artist and Yuill/Crowley Gallery, Sydney
CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS PROJECTS SA 2006
CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART PROJECTS SA 2006 Project 6 presents the solo exhibition by John Barbour for the 2006 SALA Festival. Catalogues essayist Russell Smith says of Barbour's work, "Throughout John Barbour's work you are confronted by images of failure, degradation, suffering and supplication. The works appear impoverished, derelict, slipping towards ruin and decay. The dominant tone, it seems, is plaintive, urgent, sometimes sinister, sometimes pathetic. But the one thing I was slow to see in Barbour's work... is its humour. It's a dark, secretive, slow-release humour that catches you at the bottom of the stairs, or creeps up on you in the middle of next week."
John Barbour has commented: "My art practice can be described as intimate yet estranged. Intimate in that the objects and images I present require the closest attention to bring to light their inherent qualities and associations. Estranged in that they appear, paradoxically, as distanced and remote - as if seen from afar. This push and pull of opposites: subjective and objective, private and public, near and far, speech and silence, presence and absence, architecture and its erasure, carries over into my use of materials and forms and is deeply characteristic of my practice. The embroidered works... take as a point of reference Duchamp's idea of the readymade. However, rather than being found, mass-produced objects, these works literally suggest a falling away from - an unpicking - of the object. Obdurately handmade, sometimes extravagantly, sometimes quietly, sometimes awkwardly, my works reflect an understanding of the human as decidedly imperfect."
Russell Smith states further, "while the materials are humble, and their handling is studiedly crude or awkward, Barbour's art is never abject: it does not protest or signify its lowness. Barbour's work is essentially humorous, and that this is a humour, not of the laugh, but of the smile; not of the joke, but of 'true humour': the quiet acknowledgement of human finitude, and the recognition that, to borrow a phrase from Beckett, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness".
John Barbour is represented by Yuill/Crowley Gallery, Sydney
Catalogue Essay (596kb pdf) by Russell Smith