Gallerysmith

Posted: 24 Nov 2011  |  By: Elizabeth Fortescue

The serious illness of a small child would prompt many parents to shut up shop and put out the ‘back later’ sign. But when Marita Smith’s son Linus was diagnosed with cancer, it was a cue for Smith to fulfil a long-held wish — to establish an art gallery of her own. “It was a very, very difficult time, but something really fantastic came out of it,” Smith says of the year Linus spent having chemotherapy in hospital. “He’s very healthy and well now, and we have this wonderful gallery.”

The diagnosis was in 2007, and Gallerysmith opened in North Melbourne in 2008. For Smith, who was also caring for a newborn and an older child as well as Linus, it was a time of intense emotion. “I just needed to escape, to distract myself,” Smith says. “I needed to channel my energy in a positive way.” Linus’s fighting spirit has infused the gallery. “My children do spend a lot of time here and they love it; they find it really inspiring,” Smith says.

Smith has qualifications in architecture, fine art and museum studies, and the hope of having her own gallery was “always on the horizon”, even while she was enjoying her job as the curator of the art collection at the Victorian Arts Centre between 2001 and 2006. “Coming from a collecting institution [rather than an auction house background] gives me a different perspective and I think my stable of artists reflects that experience,” Smith says. “I’m interested in artists whose practices reflect our culture and identity and the environment, because I think these are all important contemporary issues. In my view, over time, it’s these types of works that will find themselves in museum collections because they have an important cultural value. So the artists that I represent might not be ‘fashionable’ just yet, but in my view they’re already really significant because they make really valid and sometimes really provocative comments about how the earth has shifted and how we function or not in contemporary society. So they’re the sorts of things that I’m interested in. In some ways it’s a somewhat unique perspective. I don’t think there are many gallery directors who come from the sort of background that I’ve come from.”

A political sensibility characterises many of the artists in Gallerysmith’s stable. Among these artists is Nici Cumpston of Adelaide, whose heritage is Aboriginal and Afghani. Cumpston’s work, which is mainly in the medium of photography, will be seen in the 2012 National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia.

“She is looking at the way the landscape has changed as a consequence of colonisation,” Smith says. “She’s really interested in the remnants of pre-colonial habitation by Aboriginal people. So she explores the landscape in that way. She goes to these interesting sites around lakes and riverbeds where Aboriginal groups used to meet, and she goes out to these sites with elders from either her language group or other language groups, and she learns about the landscape through their interpretation. So she learns how to look at the signs of habitation, whether it’s camp sites or boundary trees that have been bound together to represent a place of abundance or whether it’s a burial site, and she documents those type of things photographically. The interesting thing is that she photographs in black and white and then hand-colours in pencil and watercolour so you have this lovely, sensitive approach to photography.

“She was one of the first artists that I invited into the stable. Since then she’s been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and she’s very highly sought after. She’s in public shows all the time.”

Young Brisbane-based artist Eric Bridgeman, another Gallerysmith artist, works with photography, performance, video, installation, sculpture and painting to produce sassy, irreverent, sometimes confronting works which expose and ridicule archetypes relating to race, gender and culture. “You rarely come across an artist who is straight out of art school whose work is so conceptually resolved,” Smith says. “His work is just exquisite. It’s really, really exciting work. He’s a rising star.”

Bridgeman’s photographic series titled The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules was included in The New Fresh Cut at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2008 and was seen at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 2010.

Smith is excited by much of the new work coming out of Brisbane, citing another artist in her stable, Simone Eisler, who works across a range of media to explore her ideas about the possible evolution of species in the contemporary world. Eisler has been commissioned to create many public artworks and has shown her work in New York and Paris. Materials as diverse as goat horns, barramundi scales and snake skins find their way into her hybrid sculptural creations.

Another Gallerysmith artist, Paula do Prado of Sydney, tests the supposed multicultural tolerance of Australia in her paintings and mixed media works. “She’s Uruguayan born and she looks at issues about her Latin American–African roots, but she’s also interested in issues that surround sexualisation of black women in mainstream culture. And she does this through text-based textile works,” Smith says. “She’s a very courageous artist.”

One of the best-known artists in the Gallerysmith line-up is Dadang Christanto, the Indonesian-born multidisciplinary artist whose moving works are grounded in the first-hand experience of political oppression. Connecting itself to the grassroots of Melbourne’s art scene, Gallerysmith offers ten studios for rent to artists, and this year it opened a rentable exhibition space upstairs called Purgatory. “I think that’s where many artists find themselves,” Smith says.

Images from top:

Gallerysmith interior, Nici Cumpston exhibition, Attesting. Photograph Armelle Habib.

Kirrily Hammond, Gippsland Twilight 41, 2010, oil on linen, 30 x 30cm.

Robbie Harmsworth, Collecting the Golden Fleece, 2010, acrylic and gold leaf on linen, 150 x 100cm.

Dadang Christanto, I am a rock, 2010, acrylic on Belgian linen, 136 x 110cm.

Dena Kahan, Strange Garden, 2010, oil on linen, 28 x 40cm.

Kirstin Berg, New Ground, 2009, graphite, enamel, oil, ash and pins on paper, 144 x 205cm.