‘Sauced Material’ includes new and recent work from Chris Bond, Ricky Emmerton, Tara Marynowsky, Daniel Mudie Cunningham and Nicola Smith, artists who have ‘come to a beautiful point of confidence in their practice’, notes Goulburn Regional Gallery Director and exhibition curator Gina Mobayed. These practitioners stretch the narrative and form of media from film, to cardboard, books and, of course what is less easy to define; the shape of a story. Mobayed has tapped into the superficiality of contemporary information dissemination, explaining, ‘Now more than ever I think it is important to look beyond the immediacy and availability of information
on platforms like social media. Mostly, resolving ideas and making work as an artist takes
time and this exhibition is about the layers of meaning one inherits when choosing to look to existing material… These artists could not have resolved these works in the time it takes to scroll, like or swipe.’

Tara Marynowsky, Pretty Woman Project (video still), 2018, 35mm scratch film converted to HD single channel video with sound, duration 2min 40sec. Courtesy the artist and Goulburn Regional Gallery, New South Wales
The presentation pitches memory alongside the politics of origin and ownership. Bond collaborates with fictional identity Wes Thorne to create pairs of books that play with stories of origin. The original found book is embellished, or deteriorates, via non-traditional means such as scarification, splicing, re-joining and marking. Its buddy is a ‘partner in reverse’, says the gallery, drawn meticulously to mirror the former to ‘establish equilibrium between artist and characterisation.’
Marynowsky re-watched the film ‘Pretty Woman’ (1990) as a teenager but today she’s swapped rose coloured glasses for a scratched up lens. The artist presents the ‘love story’ to us through fresh eyes by drawing and scraping away sections of a 35mm film print one frame at a time. Smith also uses film as a means of departure. Her paintings lift their emotionally complex, quietly dramatic mood from stills by Structuralist filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950-2015), who used principles of a painting’s composition; colour, line, balance and the distillation of narrative and doubly, a moment in time. Mudie Cunningham is on the other side of the curtain with his film I see your true colors shining through… (2016) inspired by the cinematography of Cindy Lauper’s music video and song in a subversive iteration addressing the ‘homosocial mob violence and territorial tribalism’ evident during the Cronulla riots.

Chris Bond, I am Wes Thorne (Emily Dickinson), 2017, graphite on paper, found book, 2 pieces, 20 x 13cm. Courtesy the artist and Goulburn Regional Gallery, New South Wales
The key source materials in ‘Sauced Material’ are books and film, many of which are pillaged. Mobayed added that the artists are celebrating the value of story-telling; ‘Ricky Emmerton is painting from a deeply personal place that brings his Kalkadoon Aboriginal culture into a dialogue with Eastern and Western belief systems… his works are another experience altogether.’
Many of the works touch on a binary of what is long-form, produced over time or memory versus products that relay immediacy or are reactive. Mobayed concludes, ‘Whilst media disruption has changed the landscape of the way we interact with each other and the world around us, the core of engaging with art has not. We stop, view, look, consider… and this exhibition was curated to allow for that to happen over various measurements of time.’
Goulburn Regional Gallery
2 March to 14 April, 2018
New South Wales