CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Jay Kochel

Air operates elusively, always surrounding us yet only noticeably present when it is absent. The ambitious machine drawings of Canberra based Jay Kochel seek to articulate the imperceptible by inverting notions of solidity and immateriality. Inspired by Japanese concepts of meditation and perception, Kochel creates ‘air studies’ that extract, map and translate both the physical world and our sensory experience of it.

Working through a process of technical reinterpretation, air-filled sculptural skins replicating solid forms are transformed into flattened mesh models via a process of 3 dimensional scanning and digital pen plotting. The results are a breathtaking series of complex, ethereal studies in line and space.

Jay Kochel was the winner of the 2017 FLG Exploration Award for Emerging Artists. Based in Canberra Kochel completed his Doctorate in Philosophy (Visual Art) at the Australian National University, School of Art, in 2013. In 2014 he was awarded an Arts ACT Project Funding Grant and an Asialink Residency to the Kyoto Art Center, Japan. Recently, his research has focussed on scent and methods of representing the unseen. This research was part of a Vice Chancellor’s Visiting Artist Fellowship at the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the Research School of Chemistry. Kochel’s work has a multidisciplinary approach to his art practice and research methodology.

Kochel has won several awards including joint winner of the M16 Artspace Drawing Prize (2016); recipient of the Neil Roberts Award (2008) and the Anthony Forge Prize for Anthropology (2004). Prior to completing an undergraduate degree in sculpture and interactive media he studied a combined Bachelor of Anthropology and Law in 1996. Kochel’s doctoral studies focused on the relationship between fetish, magic and contemporary art. The majority of his fieldwork was conducted at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, where he researched the artefactual history of fetishism.

Jay Kochel Augmented Reality App

Download Jay Kochel’s App via the App Store.
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Jay Kochel has brilliantly created an augmented reality app that allows the viewer to experience his artwork in their three dimensional forms. It is from these forms that Kochel creates this two dimensional mechanical drawings.
With the artwork springing to life on the screen, this allows us to fully appreciate the technical skill and rendering that goes into creating these incredibly detailed works.

All images remain copyright of the artist. If you intend on sharing these images on social media, please make sure to credit the artist, Jay Kochel, and FLG.
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A System for Sentiments
Catalogue essay by Andrew Gaynor, 2018

Of the multitude of definitions that attempt to explain exactly what ‘art’ is, one of the most concise is that it is the action/result of ‘making the invisible visible’. With this in mind, Jay Kochel can be seen as taking this idea to an extreme in A System For Sentiments, a fascinating attempt to make air visually perceptible. An artist with a keen interest in science, Kochel commenced this journey after being inspired by the ability of the Spider Orchid to mimic the pheromone of the male wasp, thus ensuring pollination.¹ Intrigued by this idea, he created drawings based on the mapped airborne passage of these molecules, tracing ‘the ideas of smell as a system of encoded interaction.’² During a subsequent Asialink residency at the Kyoto Arts Centre, he was introduced to the Japanese concept of ‘reading the air’, originally interpreted as an intuitive way of decoding one’s surroundings.³ The poetic resonance between these two ideas forms the basis for this current exhibition, ‘a methodology to experiment with ideas of the immaterial.’

The spiritual concept of Zen runs deep in Japanese culture and one of its most tangible expressions are the aesthetic stone gardens known as karesansui (literally "dry landscape") designed solely for contemplation. This can be done in various ways from the rhythmic raking of the gravel into ordered furrows, to occupying a single raised position and meditating on the illusionary scene itself. Of particular note is that boulders are chosen for these walled gardens for their natural geological formation, then utilised to allude to mountains, hills and folds. Positioned singularly or in small groups, it is important that the full garden landscape is never wholly visible to the viewer, ensuring the mind’s focus on the unseen as well as the seen, a very Zen concept. Kochel first mapped then mimicked such rocks by creating diaphanous Mylar versions inflated with air. Taking it further, he then used scanning techniques to map the stones’ surfaces translating these into extremely large digital files, before printing them laboriously onto painted Dibond grounds. The resultant meshes – complex, entwined, ethereal – reveal ‘phantasmic nets, translated by iterations – from air through light, to code then ink.’ As Karl Marx once observed, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’

A System For Sentiments at Flinders Lane Gallery (FLG) is Kochel’s first solo show in Melbourne, one where the large scale prints are arranged in an orderly procession on the walls, though it is not hard to imagine viewing them through VR headsets and wandering through the resultant ghostly domain. Their technical and philosophical prowess are hallmarks of the artist’s practice, one that has been gaining him critical acclaim in recent years. The recipient of FLG’s Exploration Award 2017, the prestigious M16 Drawing Prize (Canberra) in 2016, and a past participant in the Australian National University’s Vice-Chancellor's Fellowship Scheme, Jay Kochel is a deeply thoughtful artist whose artworks conceal as much as they reveal, not unlike the meditative mysteries of the original karesansui gardens.

1.This pheromone deception is discussed in a paper by Professor Russell A. Baker. See: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201702864
2. Correspondence with the artist, July 2018. Subsequent non-footnoted quotes from the same source.
3.Somewhat debased, ‘reading the air’ now refers to interpreting another’s body language during work and social encounters.

Meanings of titles:

Tsundoku (Japanese): Leaving a book unread after buying it.
Komorebi (Japanese): The sunlight that filters through the leaves of the trees.
Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.
Kilig (Tagalog): The feeling of butterflies in your stomach, usually when something romantic takes place.
Fernweh (German): Feeling homesick for a place you have never been to.
Tartle (Scottish): The act of hesitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name.
Litmus is a stain test to determine the acidity of something.
Diadem is a crown of power.

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Past Exhibitions

A System For Sentiments

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Diadem 2018
mechanical drawing with pen & acrylic on aluminium composite panel, edition of 2
122cm x 122cm
$4,400 AUD

Kilig 2018
mechanical drawing with pen & acrylic on aluminium composite panel, edition of 2
122cm x 122cm
$4,400 AUD

Saudade 2018
mechanical drawing with pen & acrylic on aluminium composite panel, edition of 2
122cm x 169cm
$5,800 AUD

Litmus 2018
mechanical drawing with pen & acrylic on aluminium composite panel
122cm x 169cm / One Edition Remaining
$5,800 AUD

Komorebi 2018
mechanical drawing with pen & acrylic on aluminium composite panel, edition of 2
122cm x 122cm Currently on display at SJB Offices
$3,900 AUD

Tsundoku 2018
mechanical drawing with pen & acrylic on aluminium composite panel, edition of 2
122cm x 122cm Currently on display at SJB Offices
$3,900 AUD