SELECTED COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
2006 Synoptic 06 with Natasha Johns-Messenger, Mir 11, Melb, 2005 Formless, commissioned by Experimenta art Inc for Vanishing Point, Melb, 2004 Pointform, with Natasha Johns-Messenger, Conical Gallery, Melb, 1998 Cube, with Andy Thomson and Daniel von Sturmer in Strangely Familiar, curated by Claire Williams, ACCA, Melb, 1997 General Review of Gain and Loss, with Andy Thomson and Daniel von Sturmer, Westspace, Melb 1996 The Art of Listening, with Brenda Ludeman, Nicole Tomlinson and Georgina Konstandakopoulos, Linden Gallery, Melb.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2006 Apartment, at Apartment, 2002 Several Contingent Provisionalities, Penthouse and Pavement, Melb. Eraserhead, RMIT Project Space, 1998 Untitled, Grey Area Art Space Inc, Melb, In the Light of the Other 1st Floor Artist and Writers Space Melb.,1997 Scan, Studio 12, 200 Gertrude St, Melb, Flux, Stripp Gallery, Melb,1996 In Time 1st Floor Artist and Writers Space, Melb.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2007 An answer for the parts only itinerant sighs can fathom, curated by Storm Gold, Victoria Park Gallery, Stranger Geography curated by Kit Wise, Palazzo Vaj Prato Italy, 2005 Australian New Media Art, Museum Of Contemporary Art, Skopje, November, Australian Video Art 5uper, Museumsqartier, Vienna, 2004 The Visible and the Invisible commissioned for Swoon, ACCA, Melb, 2003 Video Projekt, Kings Space Gallery, Melbourne, VCA Projects, curated by John Neeson, VCA Gallery , Melbourne, 2002 Gating curated by Michael Graeve, Westspace, Melb, 1998 Lux, Curated by Julian Savage, 1st Floor, Melb, 1997 Flat, curated by Michael Goldsmith, RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, Adjacent, curated by Susie Atiwell, 200 Gertrude St, Melbourne, 1996 Dermartology, curated by Stephen O’Connell, 200 Gertude St, Melb.
AWARDS
2005 Australia Council; New Work, Experimenta Commission Funding, 1998 Australian Film Commission Grant for @, 200 Gertrude St, Melbourne,1997 200 Gertrude Studio Residency, Arts 21 Grant for General Review of Gain and Loss, Westspace, Pat Corrigan Grant for General Review of Gain and Loss, RMIT Postgraduate Award 1995 William Anglis Graduate Prize, Neville Jeffress Graduate Prize
SELECTED PRESS
2004 Swoon, Robert Nelson, The Age, 9th of August, The Visible and the Invisible, Rebecca Coates, Catalogue essay for Swoon, ACCA, Through streets of Glass to the City of Gold, Kerrie-Dee Johns, Un Magazine, Issue 2, Swoon, Andrea Tu, Broadsheet, Contemporary Visual Arts and Culture, Volume 33, No3, 2003 VCA Projects, Robert Nelson, The Age, 12th June, 2002 Public Hangings Interview, Andrew McKenzie, Through a Glass Darkly, Robert Nelson,, The Age, 7th September, 2000 Good Thinking, Daniel Parmer and Julian Savage, Ist Floor Artists and Writers Space, Webcams, The aesthetics of Liveness, Daniel Palmer, LIKE, Art Magazine, 12 (Winter 2000), 16-22, 1998 Games of Selective Vision, Peter Timms, The Age, 23rd September, @ Review Eyeline Issue 37, Daniel Palmer, Spring, 38-9, The Edge of Reality, Anita Bragge, Herald Sun, 19th of September, Morning Star Evening Star, Claire Williamson, catalogue essay, Strangely Familiar, Danny Huppatz, Art and Text, October, A General Review of Gain and Loss, Stephen O’Connell, Art and Text, April, General Review of Gain and Loss, Tanya Eccleston, catalogue essay, 1997 Flux , Brenda Ludeman, Like Magazine, November
Pointform a collaborative installation with Natasha Johns-Messenger
Pointform, a collaboration with Natasha Johns-Messenger, Conical, 2004
Formless, with NJM, commissioned for Vanishing Point by Experimenta Art Inc. 2005
Pointform
Leslie
Eastman and Natasha Johns-Messenger
Conical Contemporary Art Space Inc.
5 20 November 2004
by Kit Wise Un Magazine Issue 3
Pointform, a collaborative spatial installation by Leslie Eastman and Natasha Johns-Messenger, proposed that the space of the gallery itself was both the subject and the spectacle of the work. Pointform seemed to present a philosophical problem, perhaps a variation on the seminal essay by Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded field’, concerning how the site of an art work and the work in that site is seen to ‘collaborate’ in the perception of the viewer. In addition to focusing on the remarkably beautiful gallery, a central concern was the impossibility of registering the space of the work in isolation from the active viewer. That much-vexed notion of perception was given a thorough going over. Not only was the perceptive act of individual viewers deconstructed; there was the experience of observing other people in that space the perceiving of the perceivers.
Subtle shifts in the reading of the architecture of Conical were overpowered by the seemingly fragmented bodies of the other viewers floating hand gestures, disembodied heads, absent torsos caused by a deceptively simple device. A mirrored wall bisected the gallery, with the middle band removed and placed across an adjacent corner. The mirror was a highly reflective membrane, stretched over a triangulated steel frame and heated with blowtorches to be pulled absolutely taught. The material suggested the infinitely sensitive chemical surface of a photographic negative or cine-film. Perhaps solarisation, the lower-tech forerunner of such processes, where the negative or shadow of an object is recorded through sunlight falling over it and onto specially treated paper, more accurately described the interplay of presence, absence and light in the installation. Curious moments of mise en scène proliferated, often reminiscent of the 1933 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), as the field of our peripheral vision became a mutable and fluctuating zone, a blind spot in our experience of the gallery.
The revolutionary illusionism of James Whales‘ early special effects seemed to resonate throughout the installation. Voids in perception were encountered in the locations where the reflective surface of the work and the fabric of the architecture met. Too intimate to be disrupted by the reflected image of the viewer, these small sites created Rorschach-like patterns, an effect emphasized by the mottled texture of the distressed walls of the gallery. As intended with the original psychometric tests, these quieter instances in the installation where the imagination of the viewer projected through the perception of an image represented unformed absences. Capable of registering the act of perception alone, they excluded the absolutes of both the space and the viewer.
Assume that any notion of space can be taken as an absolute in the advent of quantum mechanics and string theory; in which space bends under gravity and the three dimensions are reconciled with another seven (if not twenty three...). In this context, Eastman and Johns-Messenger could be said to have introduced a ‘singularity’ into the gallery: a unique point (or point-form) such as a black hole, which answers only to its own rules of physics and in doing so poses profound questions about the medium that has created it.
Perhaps it is not the answers provided by science but its hypotheses that were of real interest to the artists. The pictorial systems of classical perspective and analytical cubism were both interrogated by the installation. The dependence on vanishing points and horizon lines on the one hand; and refracted, unfolding multiple-views of objects (viewers) in space on the other. Perhaps the work operated as Einstein predicted, by deforming vision and the perception of space, through the ‘gravity’ of the installation. Rather like a diffraction grating, which is capable of bending light into curving, converging trajectories, Pointform conflated figure and ground, content and context, revealing perception as the glue or gamut of the two conditions. In doing this, the work accelerated a familiar aspect of current Melbourne practice via a collaborative methodology, both in the partnership of Eastman and Johns-Messenger, and within the scope of the project itself. This very timely ambition harnessed the potential of relational aesthetics with the best of post-Minimalist abstraction: able ‘to boldly go and seek out new life…’
Kit Wise is an artist and occasional art writer.