The Visible and the Invisible
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.
Commissioned for Swoon, ACCA June, 2004. Curator Juliana Engberg.
Polycarbonate, stainless steel, movement activated lighting.
" Being Established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in the transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence the modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self which always thinks of them and since my life always precedes and survives itself. Yet this same thinking nature which produces in me a superabundance of being, opens the world to me through a perspective, along which there comes to me a feeling of my contingency, the dread of being outstripped,so that,although I do not manage to encompass my death in thought, I never the less live in an atmostsphere of death in general, and there is a kind of essence of death always on the horizon of my thinking. In short just as the instant of my death is a future to which I have no access, so I am necessarily destined never to live through the presence of another to himself. And yet each other person does exist for me as an unchallengable style or setting of co-existence, and my life has a social atmostsphere just as it has a flavour of mortality".
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception,Routledge and Keagan 1962, page 424.
Swoon
Reviewer Robert Nelson The Age June 9, 2004
This exhibition is rather more intellectual than the title would imply. When I think of swooning, I see people about to faint in a sentimental transport. In a swoon, the imminent loss of consciousness is always of an amorous nature.
Meanwhile, the works in this exhibition are "aloof and cool in their attitude", as the curator Juliana Engberg confesses. It's a curious aesthetic, this one; because the works withdraw from overt expression yet surreptitiously imply the delirium of infatuation.
The first is Christopher Langton's Hypnoscope. It fills a large wall with giant, plastic, elliptical bubbles, marked with contours in bright colours. It's a wanton industrial ejaculation, spraying the white cube with lustful surplus production, wild and spasmic, spilling excessively with euphoria, distilled as shiny, oozing, synthetic biological material.
Dale Frank's painting Billy Crudup also enjoys the oozing character that is perhaps inherent in thick red paint, spreading itself across a field like a kind of viscous bed stain. The artist has declared that the "object of his work was to harvest desire". The painting has found a good home in this exhibition, because its excesses can be construed as convulsively libidinous rather than a formulaic or mechanistic gimmick.
David Rosetzky's Summer blend is a screen performance, with a number of handsome young people of both sexes rubbing cream into their skin. This autoerotic indulgence is staged with laidback music, leaving you with the sense of a commercial inducement to savour the summer blend of the title. You wonder what the summer blend might be. Surely not just sunscreen, which you don't need on the inside of the thigh! Perhaps moisturiser enhanced with stereotypical advertising hype? Cool and inscrutable, this annoying soft-porn deconstructs the swooning orgasmic enticements of commercial media.
Part of the rationale for the exhibition is an argument between minimalist and figurative painting. Once illusionistic space has been taken from painting, the surface is left swooning for pictorial content. Sean Meilak's convivial paintings on paper and Jan Nelson's featherweight photorealist pictures of alienated youth celebrate a photographic skin rather than the depth and heavy clout of the western perceptual tradition. This element of the exhibition is enhanced by a contrast with the minimalist work of John Nixon in the main space at ACCA.
But the most remarkable piece in Swoon is Leslie Eastman's large architectonic installation The Visible and the Invisible. The room contains two curved walls made of semi-reflective mirror glass in which your reflection is made wider. On the inside, where the mirrors are convex, you become very narrow. These transformations prepare you for the crisis of walking between the two walls on a Z-shaped excursion from door to door. Your reflection in one screen is seen in the other, so your image is replicated many times as you near the point of greatest convergence. But because the glass is only partially reflective, you also see the real space of the room through the glass. Thus the virtual reflections interfere with the spatial truth of the architecture, with chaotic perceptual consequences.
When you see your reflection in a mirror, you automatically adjust to all the terms of the virtual space, even though your size and movement in the mirror are different to those in real space. In Eastman's hall of semireflections, the co-ordinates of the room remain in place against their folded curving reflections; so the real and the virtual interact. Your whole spatial relativity is upended. The natural bounce of your gait seems to determine the horizon; so that your image remains constant while the room that you perceive around your image bounces up and down. The references of the real world and the virtual world are gently inverted, as your bobbing body is echoed in a framework that ought to be still.
When you enter the space from the far room, other reflections seem to intercept your pathway. I witnessed one person pawing the air, as if trying to remove a cobweb or a fly in front of her face. It was only the reflection of the architrave. Finally, however, you succumb to all disorienting rhythms; you drop the physics and enter into a world of baroque spatial swooning, as in the sumptuous architecture of Borromini 350 years ago
All images copyright 2007