Exhibitions Richard Blackwell Labyrinth 16th June 2020 - 11th July 2020

LABYRINTH
Catalogue essay by Elli Walsh 2020

Straddling sculpture and printmedia, the interdisciplinary creations of Richard Blackwell trace the physiognomy and psychology of the built environment. Created on film faced plywood, the labyrinthine reliefs in his new series deal with ideas of modularity, fusing individual experience with architectonic space and dismantling what’s left of the weathered walls between physicality and digitality.

Blackwell’s parametric designs represent his attempts to create iterative processes and logic around his felt experiences of the city. There is no figural presence, yet the works function as the private lens of the artist; a kind of synecdochic proxy for his perceptions and memories. ‘As the creator, I see the figure that is looking at the spaces in these works’, he explains. In a phenomenological sense, the panels materialise the act of looking – at the urban environment and, ultimately, at oneself. His abstract topographies reference Blackwell’s time living in Doha for three years, a city seemingly devoid of public space, where private places or ‘nodes’ are connected via virtual and physical highways or ‘branches’. Departing from the grounded perspective of previous works, this series summons nights spent staring downwards at the city through the window of his high-rise apartment. A timbre of loneliness is exposed through the isometric, aerial viewpoints, where curvilinear forms recede into the darkness of an impenetrable, anonymous landscape. Disconnection is made palpable as we witness the private opticality of a new kind of flaneur.

The works in ‘Labyrinth’ examine the evolving interfaces between artist and machine, creativity and execution. Blackwell considers the ways in which human limitation can be transcended by creating systems of production that supplant manual labour, reflecting the rapidly advancing technical systems that society is built upon, and the ways human creation is conforming to those systems. He explains, ‘my work is a reflection of what it means to make. In an optimistic sense, the collective knowledge that we build, store and disseminate via the Internet empowers people to do amazing things; but in the pessimistic sense, many people’s creative expression is reduced to selecting a few filters for their Instagram stories’. Informed by his roots as a printmaker, Blackwell renders his designs in three dimensions, creating a matrix, before projecting them flat; impressing a moment in time. By translating this relationship between the matrix, the machine and the moment – where embodied observations are parsed by technological systems – his works distil notions of the post-hand; the post-human.

Engaging with the legacy of Modernism, and adding to the lineage of abstractionists like Frank Stella, Blackwell’s relief panels echo the architectonic contours and surfaces of Doha, with its a surreal hybrid landscape of ultra-modern and ancient Islamic design, futuristic facades and mashrabiya. The works function as urban cartography, and yet they also map the complicated, lonely virtual spaces that are rapidly subsuming contemporary (Western) ontology. Blackwell grapples with the unknown ways in which virtuality is changing our social reality and collapsing geographical space – a concept sharpened during the current Covid crisis. The disorienting convergence of the physical and virtual is visualised in the works’ mesmeric symmetry, repetition and axial reflections, which duplicate the parallel and perpendicular surfaces of the civilised city. Voluminous topographies are reflected back on themselves, rupturing spatial certainty and thwarting the viewer’s ability to logically traverse each microcosmic metropolis. Meanwhile, the ostensible softness of engraved fabric-like folds collides with the hard materiality of wood. These unicursal forms become labyrinths in the literal sense, but also in the mythological sense; spiritual paths severed from linear time and direction. The voyager/viewer finds themselves in a liminal realm where physical place and virtual space tesselate in a hypnotic rhythm. A surreality emerges herein, as walls and buildings morph into faces and flora, crystalline structures, circulatory systems and cellular networks. The panels’ undulating surfaces seem to breathe, to swell with life, and we are reminded once more of the interconnectedness of all things.

Watch YouTube videos of:

Labyrinth

Spark

Mask

Lost

City

IN BRIEF: Blackwell is an Australian artist recently relocated to Sydney after years based in Doha, where he was employed as the Assistant Professor of the Foundation Woodshop and Digital Lab at VCU Arts in Qatar. He was the recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholarship and completed his Masters in Fine Art at the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. In 2011 Blackwell exhibited a major series GROTTO, an exhibition in 3 volumes, which was shown in Canberra, FLG Melbourne and Chicago, supported through the Australia Council of the Arts.

His work has been collected for Artbank, NAB Collection, The Justin Collection and he has undertaken several public commissions including the Mayfare Apartments, Canberra, 65 Mary Street, Brisbane and the NEXUS M+A Laneway Project, Brisbane, both undertaken with Urban Art Projects.

RICHARD BLACKWELL PROFILE
DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)

Richard Blackwell
Capsule Space Corp 2020
Plywood, laminate and etching ink
90cm x 112cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
Fibre 2020
Plywood, laminate and etching ink
65cm x 50cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
Coax 2020
Plywood, laminate and etching ink
50cm x 52cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
Labyrinth 2020
Film faced plywood
160cm x 320cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
City 2020
OSB, Etching ink & acrylic seal, in artist's studio
120cm x 170cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
Graphite 2020
film-faced plywood, at SJB Interiors
118cm x 180cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
Mask 2020
Film faced plywood,
118cm x 87cm x 4cm in artist's studio

Richard Blackwell
Lost 2020
film faced plywood, at SJB Interiors
190cm x 116cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
Spark 2020
OSB, Etching ink & acrylic seal,
118cm x 76cm , in artist's studio

Richard Blackwell
Sync 2020
OSB, Etching ink & acrylic seal,
116cm x 74cm x 4cm

Richard Blackwell
Labyrinth Offset Surface AP1 2020
mechanical ink drawing, framed AP1
75cm x 55cm framed size 84 x 65cm

Richard Blackwell
Labyrinth Offset Surface AP3 2020
mechanical ink drawing, framed AP3
75cm x 55cm framed size 84 x 65cm

Richard Blackwell
Labyrinth Offset Surface AP4 2020
mechanical ink drawing, framed AP4
75cm x 55cm framed size 84 x 65cm

Richard Blackwell
Labyrinth Offset Surface AP2 2020
mechanical ink drawing, framed AP2
75cm x 55cm framed size 84 x 65cm