Opening Tess Horwitz’ show - DUSK
Speech presented on June 2, 2021 at The Australian National Capital Artists Inc. (ANCA), Dickson, ACT
I've have had the privilege of knowing Tess Horwitz (and her partner Tony Steel) some years now as I have made Canberra home. Tess and I share a lot in common, I think. We have a deep desire to make visible what is invisible, including beauty and courage in an increasingly liquid world stressed by adverse climate events; aware of the power of nature and of humankind’s own gratifying power to mess with nature.
Tess has a piercing way of seeing. Here in this show, she takes what her immediate family sees in their repeat dreams, hosts them and interprets them as a visual maker; making visceral what is in the cinema of their minds in the wake of Black Summer.
In lamenting those existential days, Tess shared with me a dream she had when young and one that has stayed with her all her life. The dream first appeared during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In the dream, Tess says, she is ”standing on the top of a hill and under a beautiful tree and looking out over a big, expansive landscape.. And then an atom bomb goes off in the distance.”
“It's incredibly beautiful, a spectacular site," she says, “and at the same time, I know it's going to destroy me”. But, "there is no point running and so I just stand [there] and watch it.”
In and among everything that happened that Black Summer, Canberra had a freak hailstorm that hit the Parliamentary Triangle. Do you remember that? Tess saw its devastation on her way to work at the National Gallery of Australia. She saw the smashed glass and pimpled metal, all the concrete and asphalt covered with a thick green carpet of leaves. The surrealist that she is, saw and marvelled at the wildness of things, the storm’s “strange beauty”. She delighted in the power of nature; the drama.
And so about us are images that emerge from panoramic and re-iterative dreams that are also tied, inexplicably, to real-life drama, past, present and future. We travel across time in a collaborative TARDIS. Ara, Tess and Tony's daughter flees zombie mermaids, on the back of a giant snail. Liam, their son, an environmental scientist now living in Berlin isn’t on the move but positioned like a great protector and genie of lands. Tony is on the move, warning others of unseen danger while awe-struck by mountains and valleys made over millions of years by large clumps of residue and seawater. He is a protagonist in a cinematic experience. Tess, in her own story - the flowing “Hills Hoist and the Bandstand” triptych is among slithering eels in a moat, the ancient and regenerative creature also a symbol of the apocalypse. These are mythical tales with a deep religious dimension. There is a cosmic language here that allows for figuration and landscape to exist alongside abstraction and the influences of still and moving photography, turning playful ambiguities into a merging and cohesive space.
Dreams Tess reminds me, are at least a third of our lives. We are often in that liminal world in the mind and now we are in a liminal world of our own making. Dreams, of course, situate the self in discourse, layers of the self rather than the self in nature. But who can forget the images of flames and injured animals of Black Summer and closer to home the acrid yellow smoke that smothered this city, making the outdoors a health hazard?; that time when night became day and the abnormal, habitual. It was a preview for COVID and yet so quickly vanished from the focus of news and the public imagination.
This is an important theme… What do we choose to remember and reflect on and what do we choose to forget? What are we conscious of and replay? Whether we are aware of it or not, news-making machines and public officials help script what is forgotten, AND what is talked about and memorialised. Tess is prodding us - what do we look at when it’s DUSK, at the end of the day? Some say there is no wisdom in the morning, only wisdom at DUSK and yet we wake in the morning after dreaming.
The other big question these works pose is, how do we live with our contemporary anxieties about the climate catastrophe; how do we look, really look, that is poke, engage and tussle with given the planet's warning and that pain; how do we hold our grief while also having hope? It’s a question I have been asking myself in my own hybrid arts and writing practice.
These are, of course, drawings. They are drawings made with black and white charcoal on thick paper, what's called Arches paper. They need to be on Arches paper because Tess has worked the drawings over and over, testing the surface, rubbing back the charcoal for re-design and for effect. The medium - charcoal - cannot be lost on us. The material is carbon residue produced by strongly heating wood in minimal oxygen to remove all water and volatile constituents. Carbon residue is Tess’ material choice and humanity’s wicked problem.
Beyond that choice, why draw over any other visual process? This is Tess’s first show in a long time and drawing is what, I surmise, she simply found the most accessible thing to do.. When all is lost or when there is so much waiting to be said, return to gestural mark-making… A process that asserts agency and helps the hand of the maker gain some control in a world that may feel out of control. These are visual stories of discomfort but they offer a balm to teach, drawn from the sage unconscious.
With that, I congratulate Tess and declare DUSK here at ANCA, open!