PRINTEMPS/ÉTÉ 2000 is an exhibition of works by Justin Trendall and Todd Robinson. It includes a series of works produced by each artist. 

Robinson's work comprises three black patinated bronze wall-mounted sculptures derived from a single pair of vintage Helmut Lang trousers from the Spring/Summer 2000 collection. Lang, an Austrian fashion designer, gained prominence in the early nineteen nineties with a minimal, utilitarian, hard-edged fashion aesthetic. A fourth work, a framed photographic image of a standing black-clad figure, completes the series. Like the bronzes, this image is presented as a torn fragment, cut from a larger whole.

The two types of work, the cast bronze sculptural triptych and the photographic image, are presented in relation to one another. The spatial arrangement, adjacent across two walls, suggests an indexical relationship, given the black lustrous appearance of both the bronze waxed casts and the garments in the image. However, the origin of all these works lays in Robinson’s personal history and archive of garments, fashion photographs, and magazine tear sheets dating from the mid-90s, when he worked as a clothing designer. 

On the opposing wall Trendall’s series of unique state screen prints explore tensions between pattern and diagram, knowledge, and decoration. At first glance the works in the exhibition present as exercises in ornamental design, their appearance owing more to the decorative traditions of textiles and ceramics than to the tropes of contemporary art. This first impression, however, is almost immediately complicated by the presence of the name sets embedded in each piece. These are Trendall’s signature, so to speak, present across the full span of his practice. It is through variations in the selection and placement of these names that each piece holds out the possibility of being read as theoretical position and aesthetic effect.

Drawn from a range of sources the names casually invite viewers into a game of decipherment. Here and there connections appear. Clusters of names emerge from the mix. Some cite specific political concerns; a group of suffragettes invoking historical struggles for equality; a list of Black Summer bushfires signalling the spectre of climate change. Others appear to be drawn from more mundane areas of life; soccer teams and artists collectives regularly feature in the mix, famous and forgotten, global and local. And scattered throughout are the names philosophers, theorists and theologians.

The exhibition has evolved out of a series of discussions foregrounding the importance of textiles in both artists’ practices. The conversation pivoted initially on the unthematized role of textiles in their respective practices, and its historically marginal status in art, then moved towards the historical significance of textiles within the applied arts, and its importance within a host of sub-cultural milieus of fashion, music via printed band t-shirts and fabric banners of political protest. 

Each has produced extended bodies of work which have consciously drawn upon a lived connection to textiles for visual and conceptual inspiration. For Trendall’s knowledge of fabrics is a family inheritance of sorts, a lifetime of conversations with his mother, Kath Trendall, about her spinning and weaving activities has left a legacy. In Robinson’s case it is a long and varied engagement with clothing design, and a material sensibility that emerges from working with textiles in that disciplinary domain. 

Each series carries traces of the past on their surface. Trendall’s silk screens register delicate discursive webs arranging and connecting diverse historical references from environmental events, politics, and theory to the artist’s own social world, proffering an aesthetic and conceptual pedagogy that is collective, however idiosyncratic, and deeply personal. While Robinson’s, artistic methodology of direct casting vintage fashion garments, somewhat paradoxically destroys and preserves the historical in a form that intensifies, and abstracts its elements, highlighting the tiny details, the seam junctions, pockets, buttons and the undulating folds of fabric, as a haptic orchestration of historically specific feelings, energies, and attitudes. 

Todd Robinson creates evocative sculptures that invite tactile, visceral, and emotional responses from audiences. His work plays with ambiguous representations of materials and forms, challenging expected material behaviours and relationships. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions and projects in Australia, China, Europe, and USA. His works are held in the public collections of Ipswich Art Gallery, Queensland; National Gallery of Victoria; ARTBANK; and Woollahra Council. He lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia.

Justin Trendall is a contemporary artist based in Sydney, working on Gadigal land. He received an MVA from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney in 1994. Since graduating he has produced an extensive body of work which has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Focussing on connections between history and cultural identity his practice explores ways in which the complex and dynamic nature of our relationship to the past can be visually represented. Best known for his ‘cultural maps’, an ongoing series of large scale fabric prints, he has also produced bodies of work that take up these same themes through the mediums of ceramics, photography and Lego. The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of NSW, Monash University and the National Gallery of Australia all hold his work in their collections.