Clarity & Mud
Steven Rendall, Michael Graeve
16 Aug–9 Sep 2023
We also use items extracted from a list of sub proposals to structure the exhibition (akin to an employee's performance plan). This involves also combinations of paintings (dated 1989-2023)... also play and seriousness in relation to status, institution and practice.
These look like concepts:
3. The exhibition will function to disambiguate process from concept.
31. Include another person (NC). Rate out of 10. PS.Thank you Vittoria Di Stefano. 9/10.
33. Disambiguate this list.
34. Is this a diagram of slops and slimes of painting?
35. Is this a tabularisation of clarity vs mud?
20. We have a SharePoint document to refer to for reference...
21. ...
25. Use ‘tonal shifts’ to create new possibilities – ie: the discrepancy between Sarah Jessica Parker’s Born Lovely perfume (2018) and Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (unfinished, published 1626).
These look like processes:
19a. As part of the performance review, we audit the space for moisture with Michael’s Crommelin® Moisture Meter. [Pending, work in progress.]
19b. This meter has 2 metal pins that leave small teeth marks that can be used as starting points for further decisions. [Underdeveloped.]
24. There will be a naughty painting standing in the corner. [Redact the word naughty.]
26. Make Michael’s paintings funnier.
27. Make a pact with Black Sabbath (the 1970s incarnation) (this should have been item 13, but the document renumbered the list).
28. Paintings are pseudo people – can we prove this
29. Looking at paintings the wrong way is better than the correct way – prove
32. Include non paintings (silver tarpaulins)
Steven Rendall’s work is littered with references to technology, art history, horror movies and pop music. Materials, images and meanings are scavenged and rearranged in various ways.
Rendall was born in the UK in 1969. He moved to Melbourne in 2000 where he currently lives and works. Steven Rendall is a lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University. He completed a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) at DeMontfort University in Leicester, undertook post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools in London and completed a PhD at Monash University in 2015.
Rendall has staged numerous exhibitions in Australia and the UK. His work is in various collections including The National Gallery of Victoria, The Monash University Collection, Artbank, RMIT University Art Collection, The City of Melbourne, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne and St. Helier Hospital, London.
Michael Graeve is a visual and sound artist based in Castlemaine, Australia. He exhibits and performs internationally.
He works across painting and sound disciplines through easel painting, site-specific installation, painting and sound installation, sound performance and composition. By engaging painting and sound art practices in dialogue, he seeks to extend frameworks for their creation and reading into oscillations between conjunctive and disjunctive relations. The visual aspects of his work build upon non-representational and abstract traditions that are applied to canvas and walls, while the sound work is performed on, and composed from, record player and loudspeakers installations and improvisations. Installation space provides a playground for their overlap and juxtaposition, resulting in a suspenseful dialectic between causal relations and awkward un-relations.