The Visitors: Aliens and UFOs in Contemporary Art

Erik Jensen

December 11, 2007

In 1868 a floating ark, filled with paper and piloted by a neutral-coloured spirit, abducted surveyor Frederick Birmingham and took him to the highest point of Parramatta Park, kindly returning him to awake in his own home. Birmingham had another UFO sighting in 1873 and became so obsessed with the phenomenon he set down his experiences in a book.

By 1950, Katoomba and the surrounding Blue Mountains had become a hotbed of extraterrestrial sightings - a flap, to use the ufological term. Fever was such that the happenings made the front page of the Herald and the RAAF was put on standby with a warning not to provoke the aliens. Since then, incidents have become frequent enough to inspire a new exhibition at the Penrith Regional Gallery.

"My sons were out at a place they call the Ruined Castle at Faulconbridge, a derelict house out in a paddock. They saw what they described as a huge mothership going over," Vernon Treweeke, an artist participating in the Penrith show, says of his experiences.

"It went over and it was silent, they didn't hear anything until it had passed. It must have been very high in the atmosphere. Obviously, it might have been in space. Hard to tell. They described it as having some sort of symbol underneath it, a large sort of hieroglyph type of thing. It had portholes as well."

The curtains on Treweeke's house, in bushland at Hazelbrook, are drawn. The entire building is blacked-out and he answers the door with a pair of 3D glasses in his hand. Downstairs, in a basement-studio, he activates a series of ultraviolet lights. With the glasses and the fluorescent paint on his canvases, parts of the work start to morph. Blues sink into the background and oranges reach forward.

"Prismatic Fresnels," he says, referring to the beam-splitting lenses he wears. Treweeke works with colour perspective and the effects of fluorescence, painting the reaches of his imagination in a process he likens to Einstein's theoretical physics. A product of the space race, and of London psychedelia in the 1960s, he believes art can push reality in directions science is unable to explore.

"It is a return to a visionary awareness. Artists used to be visionaries, they used to paint angels and gods. They had this visionary role and then they became just like cameras with paint," he says.

"We've been through a cycle. The movies have been doing it and people are ready for it in art. The artists as visionaries can actually explore the future and sort of report on it before it happens."

Anne Loxley, co-curator of The Visitors, mounted the show when she realised how many contemporary artists were working within the realms of ufology and how prevalent sightings were on the outskirts of Sydney. "I hadn't even seen the UFOs in Tim Johnson's paintings until it was pointed out," she says of the discoveries.

The show is weighted towards believers, with only one sceptic among the 15 artists, though that is not how Loxley planned it. "It's only weighted towards art of quality. I was surprised by the believers. If it was a show about believing, it would be put on by a UFO society."

Loxley is not a believer - "too emotionally and psychologically fragile to let that be part of my life" - but describes herself as an enthusiast. She is compelled by the repetition of accounts and what she calls seductive and persuasive geological evidence in the Blue Mountains.

The show itself, however, was curated with scholarly responsibility. Prominent ufologist Bill Chalker was commissioned for a catalogue essay and the exhibition furnished with an evidence room of accounts, photographs and DNA testimony.

Chalker prides himself on forensics - he is a chemist by training - and dismisses the majority of sightings as mis-identifications. But for all the false alarms and questionable witnesses, he has proof enough to believe. "Historically, from the 1950s to now, there have been thousands of sightings [in the Blue Mountains]," he says. "In terms of unexplained sightings, there has been less than 100 but even that is a compelling number."

Chalker, who has been working in the field for 40 years, looks first at the planets to explain most sightings - dismissing those things that are probably Jupiter or a comet. But if an event is unexplainable - better still, part of a pattern or leaving behind evidence - Chalker will consider it positively.

He is fastidious to the extent that certain accounts in the exhibition catalogue were footnoted with his disapproval, though the Blue Mountains have his certification as a hot spot. Chalker says ufology is marginalised by a lack of funding and the fact many practitioners approach it from an armchair vantage. There is too much data for most to wade through and doing so is no way to advance a scientific career.

"Eyewitness testimony often puts people away in jail," Chalker says, "but when it comes to UFO sightings that same testimony is deemed uncountable."

This is where art emerges, taking the reins at the point science must leave them. "The other side of it is that the solutions to these sort of sets of problems are always artistic," David Haines, who is participating in the exhibition with partner Joyce Hinterding, says. "At the end of the day, we're very happy for art to also fabricate and construct the world as much as receive factual inputs. For us, we're also melding this material into fictional constructions."

Haines and Hinterding head into the night to record sounds the human ear cannot. "It's a sort of folk science," Haines says of the antennas and makeshift oscillators.

The work does not interpret the data, meshing the sound with video but leaving the audience to find what Hinterding calls coherences. After living in the Mountains for four years, both artists agree the prevalence of sightings has something to do with the region's association with counter-culture. Treweeke, on the other hand, believes the watching is related to elevation and clear skies - a point Loxley echoes, if not out of politeness for the people involved.

For Chalker, who has spent so long fighting for legitimacy, the question is too hard to answer: there is a hot spot but to explain it would be to solve half the problems with which his science grapples. However, he does not view the interpretations of artists as undermining his science - people think popular culture inspires sightings but it is the other way around.

That much is true for Haines, whose interest is piqued by other people's accounts and an open mind.

"It's the desire also, I think, for extra-reality. It's very easy to be dragged into the everyday. A lot of artists have spent a lot of energy trying to elevate the everyday but I think that artists are always seeking the extraordinary," he says. "I haven't spoken to anyone who has directly seen it but I've spoken to a lot of people who've looked for it and even that's interesting. It's an act of desire as much as anything, it's wanting to see it."

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/11/1197135415937.html