Charles Robb

Charles Robb is a graduate of Victorian College of the Arts, now based in Brisbane. Robb's work has been seen in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Temperature: Contemporary Queensland Sculpture (Museum of Brisbane, 2004), Gulliver's Travels (Monash University Museum of Art and interstate venues, 2002-4), Support (Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2000) and Primavera (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2000). He has forthcoming solo shows at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane (Drop) and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (Crop) and will be included in this year's National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Prize and Exhibition. He has been short-listed three times for the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, winning Judge's Commendations in 2002 and 2005. He has received project grants from Arts Queensland (2000 and 2004) and the Australia Council (2001) and he was awarded an inaugural Freedman Foundation Scholarship to research Baroque religious sculpture in Spain (2001). In addition to appearing in catalogues, his work has featured in reviews in Art and Australia, Artlink, Art Monthly, Australian Art Collector, Broadsheet, Eyeline, World Sculpture News and Contemporary. His writing has been published in Eyeline and Photofile. In 2007 Robb was included in Eye to 'I', Ballarat at Fine Art Gallery and A Draft, at UNPLACE Project, Brisbane. In early 2008 Robb was included in two exciting group shows, Interruptions at Hous Projects, New York and Mentors and Proteges, Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery. Robb presented his solo exhibition 'Filled Pauses', Dianne Tanzer Gallery from Mar-Apr 2008 and In May-June this year Robb will be included in Flop, Bundaberg Arts Centre Vault. Robb presented his paper: "Wrapped Fragments: Drapery, the Eighteenth Century Portrait Bust and the Male Subject" for King Power: Designing Masculinities Symposium, RMIT earlier this year and his public comission Rise, for the Southbank Institute of TAFE, is underway and due to be unveiled in mid-2008. Charles Robb currently holds the position of Associate Lecturer in Sculpture at the University of Southern Qld, Toowoomba. Filled Pauses In linguistics 'filled pauses' are words or sounds that mask interruptions to the flow of speech: uh, um, er, etc. As the somewhat contradictory term suggests, a 'filled pause' represents a failure of communication that simultaneously communicates an impression of hesitation, doubt and a lack of mastery. On the face of it, the ambiguity of the 'filled pause' is the opposite of the careful and controlled detail of my self-portrait busts. And yet for the past couple of years I have been interested in sculpting the kinds of unintentional expressions I notice in my studio mirror during the modelling process: expressions such as concentration, tiredness or doubt. At first incidental and fleeting, these expressions subsequently become highly rehearsed, practised over and over in the mirror until a resemblance has been achieved in plasticine. In effect, these expressions are the facial equivalent of the 'filled pause' - gestures that mask the absence of any clear content. For me, the architectonic certainty of the portrait bust and its base provides a backdrop against which the diffidence of these expressions (like the precariousness of the plaster bucket leftovers that accompany them) can be observed. What results is not simply a portrait of the artist, but a portrait of a practice. Charles Robb The sculptural self-portrait has been Charles Robb's chief preoccupation for the past five years. In contrast to the conventions of the portrait bust, Robb's meticulously crafted busts leave the heroic behind, placing the bust within a realm of 'casualty' or damage. "¨"¨On one hand these works make a feature of the problems particular to figurative sculpture - the "edit" and sculpture's internal space - but these works also explore the inherent problems of subjectivity and representation as consecrated in the work of self-portraiture. Part apotropaic, part narcissistic, at the heart of these works lies the artist's ambivalent relationship with history, authority and the self. "Crop/Undercut is the latest instalment in my ongoing project of sculptural self-portraiture. Taking the bust as a central motif, these works explore the deceptive intricacies of subject and object particular to the form, cross-referenced with the problems of interior/exterior and body/figure central to the theory of sculpture. The result is a 'crop' of plaster body sections that indicate deep suspicions regarding the paternal certainties of the sculptural hero while simultaneously lamenting their irretrievable loss."

Exhibitions

Melbourne Art Fair: The Day The Machine Started - 2010

"The works comprise a pair of self-portraits dressed in Tyvek protective suits and struggling to stay balanced while standing on tip-toes. The Tyvek suit is a common piece of studio apparel, yet simultaneously evokes notions of environmental catastrophe, toxic waste clean-up and forensic investigation. ...Here, such allusions are interrupted by the mundane source of the studio apparel and the attempt by the figures to maintain balance as they try to achieve some form of apotheosis. All works are executed in polyester resin, fibreglass and synthetic polymer paint to reproduce the ivory-like quality of the plaster cast." Charles Robb, 2010

Millwork - 2009

As the exhibition title suggests, these works are all concerned with vortices. While the crown of the head, as a cranial 'vortex', alludes to the motions of the mind within, it is also a source of heightened anxiety - the point from which baldness, that most contemporary of male fears, can spread. However, like the whorls and loops of the fingertips, the crown offers a view of the subject as foreign to others as it is to himself. The centrifugal force that emanates from the crown here meets its direct expression in the circular frames, forms that were literally spun into being. A complete anachronism, these frames nonetheless have a remarkable versatility, capable of being exhibited in any orientation. This sense of rotation, both evoked and literal, for me reflects the often immobilising uncertainty that pervades the artist's studio. And yet, the studio is also a place of exquisite convergence: where a synthetic beanie can become a pileus, the soft cap granted to the freed slave in Ancient Rome (a place where, incidentally, all slaves had their crowns shaved).

Charles Robb - Millwork (Pileus) 1 + (Crown 1)

Charles Robb - Millwork (Pileus) 2 + (Crown) 2

Charles Robb - Millwork (Pileus) 3 + (Crown) 3

Filled Pauses - 2007

In linguistics 'filled pauses' are words or sounds that mask interruptions to the flow of speech: uh, um, er, etc. As the somewhat contradictory term suggests, a 'filled pause' represents a failure of communication that simultaneously communicates an impression of hesitation, doubt and a lack of mastery. On the face of it, the ambiguity of the 'filled pause' is the opposite of the careful and controlled detail of my self-portrait busts. And yet for the past couple of years I have been interested in sculpting the kinds of unintentional expressions I notice in my studio mirror during the modelling process: expressions such as concentration, tiredness or doubt. At first incidental and fleeting, these expressions subsequently become highly rehearsed, practised over and over in the mirror until a resemblance has been achieved in plasticine. In effect, these expressions are the facial equivalent of the 'filled pause' - gestures that mask the absence of any clear content. For me, the architectonic certainty of the portrait bust and its base provides a backdrop against which the diffidence of these expressions (like the precariousness of the plaster bucket leftovers that accompany them) can be observed. What results is not simply a portrait of the artist, but a portrait of a practice. Charles Robb

Undercut / Crop - 2006

Crop is the latest instalment in my ongoing project of sculptural self-portraiture. Taking the bust as a central motif, these works explore the deceptive intricacies of subject and object particular to the form, cross-referenced with the problems of interior/exterior and body/figure central to the theory of sculpture. The result is a 'crop' of plaster body sections that indicate deep suspicions regarding the paternal certainties of the sculptural hero while simultaneously lamenting their irretrievable loss.

Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award - 2005

Laneway Public Art Commission - 2004

A city's parks and public spaces are the conventional home for commemorative public statues and are intrinsic to the social function of the monument. They bestow an authority on the civic statue, asserting the subject's public legacy, preserving a sense of cultural continuum and instructing the wider public on their civic responsibilities. In contrast, laneways are suspicious spaces wholly given over to utility. They are the backsides of buildings, scarred by air conditioners, ducting, delivery bays and rubbish bins. The laneway is a liminal zone - neither fully private, nor fully public. This ambiguity ensures that the laneway is a site for the visceral, the internal, the illicit. Hoddle's street plan of 1837 immediately proclaimed Melbourne a fledgling city, not simply a township. Integral to this grid pattern was the access laneway, the network of narrow corridors, often unnamed, that nourished each property. In contrast to the regularity of the Melbourne grid, the laneways were ad hoc affairs, often determined by the individual needs of property developers.

Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award - 2004

Charles Joseph LaTobe (1801-75) was appointed the first governor of Victoria in 1851. History generally regards him as an ineffectual leader, able to cope with neither the demands o the fledgling settlement nor the pressures of the gold rush. Interestingly, LaTrobe was a progressive and highly cultured individual who had travelled widely, published several works of travel writing and had a great facility as a watercolourist. A firm believer in the civilising effects of education and the arts, is initiative and vision was instrumental in the establishment of the state Library (one of the first free public libraries in the world), the Royal Botanical Gardens and the University of Melbourne. His failings as a statesman may have had more to do with the incompatibility of that vision the values of the 1850s Victorian rural elite than incompetence. Whatever the case there has never been a statue of LaTrobe erected in Victoria. The commemorative statue is a familiar feature of city parks and public spaces, celebrating individual achievement and contribution but also serving as a stern reminder of social responsibility. In the context the ever-changing landscape of the modern city, the commemorative statue therefore is intended as a social fulcrum, a point of bearing for a civic identity. Landmark seeks to invert this effect, instead reconfiguring the civic statue as a disorientating and precarious phenomenon, calling into question the authority of this particular European visual langue.

Abbreviations - 2003

As a figurative artist, the chief concern of my sculptural practice has been to find ways of representing the human body that resist clich and As a figurative artists, the chief concern of my sculptural practice has been to find ways of representing the human body that classical metaphor. Working primarily with self-portraiture and using a meticulously rendered and highly realistic approach, I seek to question the way we visualise our own bodies and how this self-imaging has been influenced by sculptural tradition. This latest body of work is a response to the tradition of the portrait bust, bringing to the fore the violence implied by the classical conventions of truncation and fragmentation. If the question raised by this process becomes What might lie beneath the surface of the body?, then cross-referencing the medical model and special effects prop, seems a natural step. Drawing on these and such other disparate influences as Pop Art and baroque religious sculpture, this work allows me the opportunity to re-evaluate the conventions that surround the body as a sculptural subject matter.

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