Dale Cox

Born in Melbourne, Cox attained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne in 1987 returned in 1990 to study Honours, Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking. Cox has been shortlisted for a number of prestigious art prizes including the The Alice Prize, Alice Springs Art Gallery and Conrad Jupiters Art Prize, Gold Coast City Art Gallery in 2006. Cox has exhibited in both academic institutions and museums in Australia such as Swanston Street Gallery RMIT in 1989, Storey Hall Gallery at RMIT 1992 and The City Museum, Melbourne in 1992. Cox has shown with Dianne Tanzer Gallery in a number of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions. Solo shows comprise of the Yarra River Cargo Project in 2005, Landscape format 2006, Inland in 2007 as well as the group exhibit, Shadowbox in 2007. In 2006 Cox was awarded the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, a highly regarded outdoor sculpture exhibition held at Werribee Park in 2007. His works have been acquired by the National Australia Bank Corporate Collection and Artbank.

Exhibitions

tract - 2008

tract This series of paintings explores notions of landscape, and specific areas of land as finite independent entities. By isolating a distinct area of land, I seek to indicate formal, sculptural aspects that might be overlooked in a continuous traditional vista. The paintings continue my exploration of the further potential of contemporary Australian landscape painting. Typified by contained, finite sections or 'tracts' of land presented to the viewer within a darkened, neutral and ambiguous space, these works aim to amplify the notion of 'places as spaces', the notion of landscape as entity. The works depict finite places as unique wholes, evoking the arbitrary delineations that are routinely made across landscapes by notions of property and land titles, territories, borders etc. Indeed we overlay the landscape with any number of these arbitrary divisions, objectifying the 'land as object' The paintings seek to amplify ideas of how the land now operates within our human domain, whereas once mankind operated within the natural domain. The largest work 'tract' is an invented place. It is my intention to portray an interpretation of a broader, generalized thinking of the land- and by contriving of these 'places' perhaps capture a kind of truth about the what the Australian Landscape means to me. Dale Cox May 2008

Inland - 2007

Inland continues my interpretation of the Australian landscape, and consciously explores the tradition of Australian landscape painting, while seeking to broaden an interpretation of what constitutes painting, and sculpture. Baled landscapes: parcels of land The land, in economic and saleable terms, becomes 'property'. The notion of a planet, the very soil beneath the feet, as being co-modifiable, divided into arbitrary portions, bought and sold in a marketplace, seems questionable on many bio-ethical, moral and logical levels. Territory, the domain of other animals, becomes the 'legal' ownership of space, in human terms. The baled landscapes, bundled into packages, seek to amplify the artifice of 'property', and transform the earth into absurd commodities. Similarly the paintings that show isolated 'blocks' of land play on the same theme of a compartmentalised idea of 'property'. The addition of coloured lighting is partially to enhance the idea that the land is advertised, bought and sold - fundamentally subjugated to a human use. Logging trucks The truck series seeks to convey the notion of place, and the idea that when we remove something from a place, the remaining place changes to become something, or somewhere, else. This may seem self evident until we think more deeply about landscape. The white trucks are like ghosts, transient beings that spirit away a place, forever removed from itself, and forever changed. Harvesting wild trees can never be like harvesting a 'crop'. In the brief space of our lives, the solid things around us help confirm and verify our reality. We are becoming better and better at making solid things that reinforce, reassure and inform who and what we are. However these things are displacing non 'man made' things. Many people today live in entirely man- made environments. The earth was already full of things before mankind's manipulation of it, accelerated via the industrial revolution just a few hundred years ago. Those 'unmade' things were used and transformed into new things, made to aid and affirm human existence. This has been beneficial in so many ways, but as we get even better at making new things, we are at risk of forgetting that the world was already 100% full of things mankind didn't make, and the price we have paid to turn those into the new artificial things. We are so keenly aware of ourselves and our 'new things', and so increasingly blinded to this seemingly important fact. Mobius strip: the perpetual landscape An area of Australia largely overlooked in terms of conservation value, and indeed in the history of Australian landscape painting, is the region known as the Box-Ironbark belt. The region covers a large belt of forests extending inland of the Great Dividing Range from south-eastern Queensland to Victoria. More than 200 species of birds, 44 species of mammals, 40 species of reptiles and 12 species of frogs are known from the region. The diversity of invertebrates is not known, but includes 200 plus species of ants. This unique ecosystem has been largely cleared along 85% of its original terrain. Box-Ironbark forests have experienced a long history of land use, including extensive and selective clearing taking place on the most fertile soils, and the repeated felling of trees. These activities have resulted in the great belt of forest becoming fragmented into a few disparate isolated pockets separated by intensively cleared farmland and rural activity. My aim with the perpetual landscape was to create a painting with no beginning or end. The Mobius strip is an anomaly of geometry that has just one 'side' and one edge, and essentially only one dimension that continuously loops around on itself. If you trace the surface of the painting around one full revolution you find yourself back where you began, effectively eliminating the usual dimensional confines of a canvas. The work is in some ways a small eulogy for the Box-Ironbark belt of forest, now lost. Dale Cox, 2007

Landscape Format - 2006

These works continue an exploration of new ways of seeing and depicting the Australian Landscape. I see the works as a continuation of the landscape painting tradition, whilst inviting the viewer to consider the relationship between painting and sculpture. These are paintings which need to be negotiated as three dimensional objects, and the relatively fixed viewpoint of a conventional painting is abandoned for a more kinetic viewing experience as the viewer necessarily physically 'travels' in order to contemplate the entire landscape. Cameras are inextricably connected to the process of image making and the generation of 'pictures'. They become in this instance at once redundant as cameras, but the vehicle for an enduring 'snapshot' of the Australian landscape. Photography subverted to painting. The cameras are deliberately chosen for there relatively uniform size- (whilst they represent dozens of different camera models, with very few exact same cameras used) The cameras have become 'units' of representation. The cameras can be situated in different formats, and can work in a relatively linear composition in a shallow depth of space, or conversely can be situated in a cluster and contemplated from a 360 degree field of view. I am interested in the concept of an integrated artwork across more than one object, and the commoditization process of art making. I have also become increasingly interested in spatial concepts, and wish to explore notions of surface and illusion. The idea that a solid object can be imbued with the illusion of a 3-dimensional 'picture plane' and the idea of a painting having no fixed beginning or end offers of a number of interesting compositional and theoretical possibilities.

Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award - 2006

The Werribee River Cargo is part of an ongoing Sculpture series which 'documents' the discovery of a medieval Chinese trade vessel laden with export goods that foundered in the mud of the Yarra River and was unable to set sail again. The Installation consists if an implied archeological excavation of the Yarra Cargo site. The excavation weaves an object based mythology to cloud the waters between fact and fiction, and invites discussion about revisionist and 'encounter' histories and the homogenization, transference and comodification of culture across historical and geographical timelines in the era of globalization. The artifacts themselves subvert both the history of popular culture and of the 'discovery' of Australia itself, challenging the accepted story of Australia's post indigenous colonization. The use of ancient Chinese and contemporary American cultural icons is a deliberate fusing of two diametrically opposed and disparate cultural signifiers which illustrates and accentuates the dislocating nature of globalization. By becoming homogenised we lose centrality, we become culturally diffused, without ownership of place, ideas, information or, indeed history. The choice of China as the origin of these 15th century export wares is poignant today as we witness the remarkable ascendancy of China as the industrial hub of 21st century capitalisms unquenchable hunger for mass consumer goods worldwide. The original (Yarra River) Cargo project culminated in an exhibition at Dianne Tanzer Gallery in July 2005 and included documentary photographs of the excavation as well as extensive catalogue notes describing the artifacts in terms of culturally and artistically significant pieces if sixteenth century Chinese decorative Art. Dr Kei Reeves of Melbourne University Australian History department spoke eloquently of the significance of the Cargos Discovery at the opening of the exhibition. This series is ongoing and further discoveries' are likely.

Yarra River Cargo - 2005

During the recent and ongoing construction of the 'Melbourne Docklands Precinct', a Waterfront residential and retail complex built on the site of Melbourne (Australia's) historic, but neglected 'Yarra' River mouth waterfront, an astonishing discovery was recently made by a 'Cato' excavating machine operator -who was digging out old pylons along the river mouth. A discovery which has until now been kept secret. The discovery? Artefacts (at first pottery and glass shards and small, corroded cast iron fragments) later whole figurines were discovered as well as evidence of a wooden vessel. The carbon dating of the timber found places the discovery to well before the time of First European occupation in 1835. It is speculated from the various artefacts found that the site constitutes a trade vessel laden with goods that may have foundered in the mud of the Yarra, and damaged or unable to set sail again. The Carbon dating puts a tentative date of AD 1610-1630 on the wreck! Given Australia's Geographical isolation it seems almost unbelievable that this vessel foundered on the banks of the Yarra River along the Southern Coast of mainland Australia. The reasons for the vessels location remain a mystery- as research has barely begun. Early research on the timbers recovered suggest an Asian, possibly Chinese origin. Its possible we are looking at a Large Chinese sea going 'Junk' Trade vessel, perhaps similar to those that plied the Indian Ocean in the 1500's (Over fifty years before the first Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean in 1488, fleets of hundreds of immense Chinese junks sent by the Ming Emperor Zhu Di traversed from the China Sea past Sumatra to Ceylon, India, Arabia and East Africa. Seven epic Chinese naval expeditions from 1405 to 1433 explored and brought under the Chinese tributary system the vast periphery of the Indian Ocean.) Source http://www.cronab.demon.co.uk/china.htm What is certainly just as astounding as the origins of the vessel however are the artefacts that are being unearthed! They require a complete rethink of the accepted history of Popular culture- specifically as regards its Popular Icons. 'Mickey Mouse' figurines have been unearthed, both as cast Iron shards and complete bronze statuettes, as well as other Effigies previously thought to have been the Invention of Twentieth Century (Usually American) popular culture. In an extraordinarily ironic twist we must cautiously begin to re-evaluate the origin of these animalistic, anthropomorphic Cult effigies as quite possibly, originally 'Made In China'!

Dale Cox - Yarra River Cargo Large Minnie

Dale Cox - Yarra River Cargo Minnie Mickey

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