Some exquisite and challenging prints at Megalo

Negative Press is an editioning workshop for limited edition original prints and artists’ books by Australian artists located in Brunswick, an inner Melbourne suburb. Its energetic and youthful director, Trent Walter, has brought an exhibition to the Megalo Print Gallery of the work of four artists with whom he has been collaborating.

Of the artists - Simryn Gill, Brent Harris, Julia Gorman and John Nixon - Harris is possibly the most interesting and engaging. A couple of years ago, at the Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, Harris held an exhibition titled The other side, consisting of oil paintings and monotype prints. He is an unconventional artist and I find it difficult to characterise his method of work, other than to say that a good deal of serendipity is involved, where marks that appear unconsciously in the process of work are then consciously explored and enhanced within the context of art history.

While working on a painting in 2014, a pink smudge appeared, which Harris interpreted as a figure leaning backwards – as if looking back into the painting. Harris, speaking about the experience, observed, “I then proceeded to realise this figure giving it arms and legs and accentuating its somewhat shocked gesture”.

This became the pink "witness figure" that has appeared in his recent paintings, drawings and monotypes and in the prints in this exhibition. Interpretations of Harris’s work are fluid, but these dominating pink figures seem to be bearing witness to something that is occurring in the work. The five prints in Harris’s The other side series in this exhibition are quite sophisticated in their technical realisation involving photopolymer plates, based on Harris’s black and white moody Goya-like monotypes, together with splashes of colour and linear articulation applied through screenprinting.

These are intriguing and enigmatic prints that throughout the series seem to weave a narrative that involves an Adam and Eve-like moment in The other side #2 and the gathering of dark and demonic forces in The other side #5, where the pink witness has morphed into a dejected small male figure finding himself in Dante’s inferno.

Harris is an artist whose agenda appears to be to challenge and enchant his audience without ever fully disclosing his hand. These new prints are some of his most challenging and successful prints to date.

Simryn Gill is another high-profile artist who makes intriguing objects that are frequently drawn from her extensive collections of ephemera. Born in Singapore and now resident in Sydney and Port Dickson in Malaysia, her art relishes the transcultural complexity of her existence. Gill’s collaboration with Trent Walter involves pieces of wood that had washed up in Port Dickson, which have been subsequently individually inked and printed like a frottage on sheets of an old wage rolls. The prints, appropriately titled Stacks, become a bearer of many layers of information, yet also engage us on an emotional and even spiritual level. As a viewer, I felt that was being drawn into being a witness to something that I could not fully comprehend, but it was pleasing and worrying at the same time.

Also included in the exhibition are some relief prints by John Nixon and a couple of elegant screenprints by Julia Gorman.

Printmaking in Australia remains one of the most exciting art forms and one that continues to attract some of the best artistic talent in the country. Negative Press is a relatively new and dynamic operation that is producing exquisite and challenging original prints.