Exhibitions

Grant Stevens | The Mountain and the Waterfalls

01.09.18 - 29.09.18

Australian artist Grant Stevens is perhaps best known for his pithy text-based videos that mine sources such as television, film, and the internet. Recalling advertising, screen savers, and online-confessionals, these works trade in clichés, platitudes and stock phrases, while cleverly exploring the way human psychology and communication are being shaped in the digital era.

Through his video works Stevens has presented ambiguous conversation fragments and social media communications rich with familiar tropes but altered and collaged together so that they create a sense of familiarity which is then immediately undercut, allowing new levels of meaning to emerge. If cliché had a collective noun, surely it would be ‘an embarrassment’, and the early video work Crushing (2009) has a rich and plentiful offer of broken-hearted gems. Merging the highly personal with the bleakly generic it includes the lines: ‘I’m still hopeless I loved you from the start I don’t feel well we even talked about getting a dog don’t you remember’. Stevens has viewers smirking one minute, then cringing the next.

Working across photography, sound, sculpture, drawing and installation, Grant Stevens’ practice explores the sounds, images and texts of media culture and the internet. His new exhibition at Starkwhite introduces The Mountain (2018), a moving image work exhibited for the first time here, and The Waterfalls, an ongoing photography project. Shot around New South Wales, Tasmania, and beyond The Waterfalls continues Stevens’ interest in the possibilities for self-reflection and contemplation in an era of digital overload, image saturation, and short attention spans.

Describing the process of creating the works, the artist relates how an initial Google image search of the waterfall he wants to photograph intentionally frames his experience. While actually capturing the image involves an authentic experience of being in nature and hiking to the falls, Stevens has already set the stage for what he’s going to see when he gets there, his experience is pre-mediated through the digital images he’s seen online. With other keen photographers often at the same site, Stevens waits for his turn to stand in the prime spot and take the photograph — a photograph that will be deliberately similar to all the others, its composition as uniform as possible. Indeed, Stevens applies a consistent compositional device across the entire Waterfalls series, letting the images mirror and repeat each other.

In her elegant extended essay, On Photography, Susan Sontag argues that images — particularly photographs — carry the risk of undermining true things and genuine experiences. “Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images,” Sontag notes, “people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing.” But not Grant Stevens. His practice asks “can we still have moments of wonder, reflection, contemplation? Even if it is premeditated, can it still work?” Rather than reinforce idealised understandings of the natural environment, Stevens’ artistic strategy highlights the ways in which the ‘natural’ seems to increasingly stand in for contemporary modes of contemplation and reflection. Like his video works, The Waterfalls sits on the cusp of sublime and bleakly generic.

The Mountain is a computer-generated video simulation that changes and evolves in real-time. Its appearance is shaped by the interactions of numerous cyclic elements: the time of day, fluctuations in the weather, and geological forces. As a virtual camera rotates around the perpetually changing scene, deep geological time mixes with the fickle weather and the constant passing of day and night. An ambient soundtrack accompanies the video, programmed to generate and evolve through infinite permutations. Drawing on meditation and mindfulness principles, The Mountain seeks to represent and provide space for experiences of the ever-evolving present moment.

The Mountain extends Stevens’ ongoing interests in digital representations of the natural environment to evoke metaphors for and experiences of personal reflection and stillness. In a context where the production and proliferation of images seems to become increasingly hyperactive each day and with techniques like mindfulness flourishing as coping strategies, The Mountain conflates various time-scales to slow down processes of looking. With speed, immediacy, and distraction the norm, The Mountain resists with an unfamiliar temporality.

When two things come together a third meaning is created, and it is in this conceptual space that Grant Stevens’ practice takes root. This is a familiar strategy for Grant Stevens, creating a fertile middle ground between pop culture and the profound, a spot to probe (or induce) contemporary existential crises. Fusing the iconography of modernism and conceptual art with popular digital culture and new media, his practice is underpinned by an interest in how we construct and communicate our experiences. Stevens’ work draws from familiar models of self-expression and self-help, but also offers unexpected moments of reflection. His works lay bare the machinery of emotional manipulation, while mirroring back to us how we suspend our disbelief, how we willingly indulge.

Grant Stevens’ project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Grant Stevens is an Australian artist currently based in Sydney. He has exhibited regularly since the early 2000’s, with numerous solo exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States.

Recent solo exhibitions include: You Have Within You Right Now, Everything You Need to Succeed, Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney, 2018; The Sun Set, Art by Accident, Murray Art Museum Albury, 2017; What You Seek is Seeking You, Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney, 2016; Dark Mess, Boxcopy, Brisbane, 2015; What We Had Was Real, City Gallery, Wellington, 2014; Hold Together, Fall Apart, Starkwhite, 2014; Supermassive, LA Louver, Los Angeles, 2013.

Recent group exhibitions include: Yours Internally, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (two person exhibition with Kiron Robinson, curated by David Sequeira), 2018; Prelude to Oceans from here, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (curated by Allison Holland), 2018; Evolver, LA Louver, Venice, CA, 2018; Transboundaries: Art + Connection, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 2018; Out of the Ordinary, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2017; GOMA Q:  Contemporary Queensland Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2015; In Motion, Starkwhite, 2015.

Stevens received his PhD from the Queensland University of Technology in 2007, and is currently Deputy Head of School (Art) at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney.

Grant Stevens | The Mountain and the Waterfalls | STARKWHITE
Exhibitions

Current

Past

Billy Apple® | Progressives and Other Self-Portraits

31.08 - 12.10

Marti Friedlander | Starting Point for a Complicated Story

12.07 - 24.08

John Reynolds | Some Greater Plan (for Claire)

04.06 - 06.07

Fiona Pardington | Te taha o te rangi

16.04 - 25.05

Gordon Walters | History

09.02 - 31.03

Whitney Bedford, Bill Henson, Ani O'Neill, Jonny Niesche, and Fiona Pardington | Sampler 2024

09.02 - 31.03

Jamie Te Heuheu | Quiet Thoughts and Quiet Dreams

23.11.23 - 13.01.24

Bill Henson | The Liquid Night

23.11.23 - 31.01.24

Bonco | Star Stare Start

20.10.23 - 19.11.23

Clinton Watkins | Depth of Field

20.10.23 - 19.11.23

Gordon Walters by Francis Pound | Book Launch

14.09.23

Curated by Jonny Niesche | Ümwelt

01.09.23 - 07.10.23

Richard Maloy | Raw

27.07.23 - 27.08.23

Petra Cortright | micro lemon diamond realm

07.07.23 - 26.08.23

Jonny Niesche | You say sfumato, I say sfumato

12.05.23 - 27.06.23

Billy Apple® | Divine Proportion

23.02.23 - 08.04.23

Gerold Miller, Gordon Walters | Miller meets Walters

08.12.23 - 31.01.23

FuckCancer_DontDelayFun | Blind Auction

27.10.22 - 05.11.22

John Reynolds | APOCALYPSEoCLOCK

21.10.22 - 01.12.22

Whitney Bedford | Imaginary

30.08.22 - 15.10.22

Seung Yul Oh | Huggong-Monologue

09.07.22 - 20.08.22

Gerold Miller

01.06.22 - 02.07.22

Bill Henson | Selected Works

30.04.22 - 29.05.22

Layla Rudneva-Mckay | I Roll

15.02.22 - 19.03.22

Fiona Pardington | Tarota

16.11.21 – 18.12.21

Fiona Pardington | Tarota Preview

05.10.21 – 07.10.21

Jan van der Ploeg | The Other Window

17.08.21 – 12.10.21

Laith McGregor | Second Wind

03.07.21 – 07.08.21

Richard Maloy | Maternal Routine

03.06.21 - 19.06.21

Bill Henson | 1985-2021

21.05.21 - 19.06.21

Martin Basher | Birds of Paradise

13.04.21 - 14.05.21

Will Cooke | Every Wall Is A Door

15.01.21 - 13.02.21

Jonny Niesche | Poikilos

17.11.20 - 22.12.20

Gemma Smith | Thin Air

06.10.20 - 07.11.20

Whitney Bedford, Petra Cortright, Kirsten Everberg, Judy Ledgerwood | Slippery Painting

01.09.20 - 03.10.20

Jin Jiangbo, John Reynolds | Performative Geographies

14.07.20 - 15.08.20

Group Show | Sampler 2020

14.05.20 - 06.06.20

Gordon Walters | From the Archive

05.02.20 - 07.03.20

Richard Maloy | Studio: Space & Time

28.01.20 - 01.02.20

Rebecca Baumann | New Work

27.11.19 - 21.12.19

The Estate of L. Budd et al. | the artists in conversation

22.10.19 - 16.11.19

John Reynolds | The Art of Wine

14.10.19

Billy Apple® and Tāme Iti | Flagged

08.10.19 - 12.10.19

Clinton Watkins | binary

19.09.19 - 03.11.19

Yuk King Tan | Crisis of the Ordinary

21.08.19 - 14.09.19

Group Show | Sampler 2019

23.07.19 - 15.08.19

Fiona Pardington | TIKI: Orphans of Māoriland

12.06.19 - 11.07.19

Laith McGregor | AM/PM/AM

09.05.19 - 08.06.19

BILLY APPLE® is N=One

11.04.19 - 05.05.19

Ani O'Neill | Classic Hits

14.03.19 - 10.04.19

Alicia Frankovich | Microchimerism

08.02.19 - 06.03.19

Martin Basher | One Week Stand

24.01.19 - 02.02.19

The Estate of L.Budd_et al.

11.12.18 - 22.12.18, 02.01.19 - 12.01.19

Gavin Hipkins | Block Units

14.11.18 - 08.12.18

John Stezaker | Collages

09.10.18 - 03.11.18

Grant Stevens | The Mountain and the Waterfalls

01.09.18 - 29.09.18

Whitney Bedford | Bohemia

31.07.18 - 24.08.18

Seung Yul Oh | Horizontal Loop

26.06.18 - 28.07.18

Gordon Walters | From the Walters Estate

29.05.18 - 16.06.18

Group Show | Sampler 2018

17.04.18 - 26.05.18

Alicia Frankovich, Ani O’Neill, The Estate of L Budd, et al. | 125

13.03.18 - 07.04.18

Len Lye | Love Springs Eternal

07.02.18 - 07.03.18

Richard Maloy | Things I have Seen

22.12.17

Michael Zavros | The Silver Fox

17.11.17 - 16.12.17

John Reynolds | RocksInTheSky...

17.11.17 - 24.12.17

Martin Basher | Devil at the Gates of Heaven

10.10.17 - 04.11.17

Daniel von Sturmer | Luminous Figures

02.09.17 - 30.09.17

Martin Basher | Hawaiian Tropic

01.08.17 - 26.08.17

Fiona Pardington | Nabokov's Blues: The Charmed Circle

23.06.17 - 23.07.17

John Reynolds | FrenchBayDarkly…

17.05.17 - 17.06.17

Group Show | On the Grounds

02.03.17 - 08.04.17

Billy Apple® | Art Transactions

08.02.17 - 04.03.17

Gavin Hipkins, Jin Jiangbo, Danie Mellor | Beyond Landscape

17.11.16 - 17.12.16

Laith McGregor | Swallow the Sun

01.10.16 - 12.11.16

Matt Henry | Analogues

19.09.16 - 14.10.16

John Reynolds | WalkWithMe...

30.08.16 - 24.09.16

Daniel Crooks | Vanishing Point

03.08.16 - 27.18.16

Gavin Hipkins, Richard Maloy, Daniel von Sturmer | Material Candour

05.07.16 - 22.07.16

Layla Rudneva-Mackay | Running Towards Water

07.06.16 - 08.07.16

Fiona Pardington | 100% Unicorn

24.05.16 - 25.06.16

Clinton Watkins | lowercase

19.04.16 - 18.05.16

Whitney Bedford 2016 | Lost and Found

15.03.16 - 14.04.16

Fiona Clark | For Pink Pussycat Club as part of THE BILL

20.02.16 - 22.04.16

Alicia Frankovich | The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations

06.02.16 - 05.03.16

Fiona Pardington | The Popular Recreator

11.12.15 - 23.12.15

Gavin Hipkins | Block Paintings

04.11.15 - 05.12.15

Gordon Walters | Gouaches and a Painting from the 1950s

21.09.15 - 24.10.15

Fiona Pardington | Childish Things

12.08.15 - 19.09.15

Rebecca Baumann, Brendan Van Hek, Alicia Frankovich, Len Lye, László Moholy-Nagy and Grant Stevens | In Motion

10.07.15 - 08.08.15

Grant Stevens | Hold Together, Fall Apart

07.07.15 - 02.08.15

Laith McGregor | Somewhere Anywhere

02.06.15 - 04.07.15

Arnold Manaaki Wilson, Billy Apple® | TOTEM | curated by Mary Morrison

01.05.15 - 30.05.15

Martin Basher | Jizzy Velvet

03.02.15 - 14.03.15

John Reynolds | BLUTOPIA

19.12.14

Seung Yul Oh | memmem

31.10.14 - 06.12.14

Gavin Hipkins | Erewhon

31.10.14 - 29.11.14

Rebecca Baumann | Once More With Feeling

19.09.14 - 18.10.14

Michael Zavros | Bad Dad

02.06.14 - 28.06.14

THE ANALYSIS OF BILLY APPLE®

05.05.14 - 10.05.14

Jin Jiangbo, Stella Brennan, Billy Apple, Trenton Garratt, Seung Yul Oh, John Reynolds, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Jim Speers, Yuk King Tan and Wang Dawei | SIGNALS

08.08.14 - 13.09.14

Layla Rudneva-Mackay | Blue Squares, Purple Pairs

17.03.14 - 12.04.14

Curated by Martin Basher | Lovers

06.02.14 - 06.03.14

Glen Hayward | I don't want you to worry about me

06.12.13 - 31.01.14

Matt Henry | High Fidelity

16.11.13 - 14.12.13

Li Xiaofei | Assembly Line - Entrance

03.10.13 - 26.10.13

Richard Maloy | All the things I did

04.09.13 - 30.09.13

John Reynolds | Vagabondage

22.08.13 - 21.09.13

Clinton Watkins | Frequency Colour

25.07.13 - 16.08.13

Curated by Robert Leonard | BAZINGA!

11.05.13 - 08.06.13

Whitney Bedford | This for That

09.04.13 - 04.05.13

Jin Jiangbo | Rules of Nature

08.03.13 - 04.04.13

Martin Basher | Solo Exhibition

05.02.2013 - 02.03.13

Ross Manning | Field Emissions

29.11.12 - 22.12.12, 15.01.13 - 22.01.13

Seung Yul Oh | HUGGONG

23.10.12 - 17.11.12

Jae Hoon Lee | Antarctic Fever

18.09.12 - 13.10.12

Curated by Brian Butler | Greetings from Los Angeles: Eight Artists

10.07.12 - 06.08.12