Oct. 13 - Nov. 12, 2005

Two renowned artist partnerships from Australia join their creative forces for a masterfully staged multi-media installation. Rose Farrell and George Parkin contribute a video projection as well as an audience-interactive sculpture, whereas Lyndell Brown and Charles Green present transparent photographic prints that cast shadows on the walls, creating fantastic mini-theatres.

Turning a gallery space into part cultural history museum and part psych ward, "Tranquillity," the first collaborative project by the four artists, gathers an intriguing mix of images sources - landscape videos and paintings, history books and prints, film-stills and such. It creates extraordinary resonance and suspends a sense of reality, time, and location. At the same time, it reaffirms the therapeutic and mnemonic capacity within on-going, endless visual arts practices.

Farrell & Parkin's centerpiece is a "tranquillizing" chair. Based on Benjamin Rush's original design in 1810, it is elegantly carved in walnut in the style of the Chinese Ming Dynasty. With a restricted vision through a gap in the chair's headpiece, the sitter faces a video projection on the wall. Two videos, "Nature" and "Metropolis," use footage of nature landscapes as well as urban architectures shot in various locations (Berlin, Potsdam, Brooklyn and Manhattan). Farrell & Parkin have also inserted animations of still photos from their 1991 series portraying a man wearing a bandage, a blindfold, or a surgical brace.

Brown & Green assemble a web of connections, from 19th century Japanese photography to NASA lunar landscapes, from their on-site photographs of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to stills from Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man of Johnny Depp's character William Blake. Brown & Green juxtapose these fragments to set up mental correspondences for viewers across finely-worked trompe l'oeil paintings, re-photographing the paintings, printing the images on transparent duraclear film, turning painting back into photography. Their ghostly photographs are ethereal and illusionary.

Rose Farrell (b. 1949) and George Parkin (b. 1949) have been working together for more than two decades. They have had numerous solo exhibitions including Black Room: Photographs by Farrell and Parkin at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1995), and in New York, Gauze at Gallery 31 Grand (2003), Traces of the Flood at M.Y. ART PROSPECTS (2000), Black Room at White Columns (1995/1996). Their work has also been exhibited at Singapore Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and PS1 Museum, New York.

Lyndell Brown (b. 1961) and Charles Green (b. 1953) have worked as a collaborative artist team since 1989. Among numerous solo and group exhibitions, they have exhibited at ARCO (1994, 1995), the National Gallery of Australia (2002), Nature Morte, New Delhi (1998), Singapore Art Museum (2003), and Insa Art Center, Seoul (2001). Charles Green is Associate Professor, Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne and Adjunct Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria. He is the author of 2 books including The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

"Tranquillity" was inaugurated at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in May-June 2005. We acknowledge generous support from the Australia Council and Arts Victoria. For further information and/or photographic materials, please contact Miyako Yoshinaga, tel. 212 268 7132 / e-mail MYartpro@aol.com or Sarah Martin, tel. 646 241 0323 e-mail swlkrmrtn@hotmail.com