AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, March 6, 2010.

WHAT Michelle Ussher: Luciende
WHERE Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran, 9510 2374, uplandsgallery.com

There’s an untethered quality to Michelle Ussher’s unobtrusive oils. Rendered in muted browns, greys, ambers and blues – sponged to create a watercolour-like texture – and punctuated by a cracked, seemingly weathered ceramic sculpture of a face, her works drift between reference and fiction, as if loosened from their subject. Apparently inspired by a Kurdish anecdote, in which a brother and sister cross the mountains toward Europe on horseback only to realise their faces have frozen over, Luciende offers a loose clutch of imagined scenes and evocations from the narrative, softened and blurred like a distant memory. It’s quietly stunning. Ussher’s work seems to suggest the malleability of story and imagination; the notion that once an event enters a narrative form it becomes nebulous and open. We’re left with a sense – a series of resonances – rather than a story. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–4pm, until March 20.

WHAT Tanya Dyhin: Sites of Accumulation
WHERE Gallerysmith, 170–174 Abbotsford Street, North Melbourne, 9329 1860, gallerysmith.com.au

Sydney artist Tanya Dyhin’s Sites of Accumulation engender a intriguing dichotomy of space and perspective. Running alongside Paula do Prado’s stunning textiles at Gallerysmith, her photo-media works document supposedly empty spaces, though her lens and use of various in-camera and Photoshop techniques portray the abandoned as a vessel rich in detail, memory and the evidence of change. Shot in and around the site of Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital in the months before its redevelopment, Dyhin’s works deftly abstract and manipulate planes of perspective. In the process, she managed to accentuate details of the photographic referent we might otherwise overlook. Perhaps the show’s strongest image, Sites of Accumulation #5 (pictured, above), sees an in inverted image of a decrepit room; its paint-peeled ceiling now an odd, textural base; a pile of discarded electrical tubing mirrored to create a symmetrical assemblage on what was once the room’s floor. It’s engrossing. Dyhin’s work leaves us second-guessing amid the evidence of what we thought we already knew. Thurs to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until April 3.

WHAT Riley Payne: a brief history of public sculpture from mon - fri
WHERE TCB art inc., Level 1, 12 Waratah Place, city, 9663 8233, tcbartinc.org.au

Much like the accumulated filth that often threatens to envelop the wonky TCB staircase, Riley Payne’s exquisitely rendered graphite-on-paper works find their grounding in the junk of the public domain. Indeed, the “public sculpture” to which the title of the Melbourne artist’s new show refers is one fashioned from wonderfully banal gutter debris and online flotsam and jetsam. Found objects, discarded photographs (of naked bottoms, no less), shower scene film stills, cute kittens, spectacularly crammed ashtrays, bananas and bad doodles of cigarette-smoking carrot men (you heard it) make their way into these positively odd, meticulously detailed and infinitely cheeky melanges. But there’s more at play within these works than nudie pics and bin contents. What makes Payne’s practice, honed during a half-decade stint in New York, so interesting is its multiple fields and layers of reference. Within a single image might be a drawing of an object, a drawing of drawing, and a drawing of a photograph (that has been drawn upon). In the process, he effectively recreates collage via graphite photorealism. It all points to a reverence of the circumstantial; the profundity and hilarity of what you might just find in public. Then again, to intellectualise Payne’s art might be missing the point. Sure, there’s plenty to them, but these might just be some sweet-ass drawings by a sweet-ass drawer. Sweet. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until March 13.

WHAT David Mutch: The Tourists
WHERE Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, seventhgallery.org

At first pass, David Mutch’s relatively small-scale, atmospheric prints appear a study of the interface between urbanity and nature. His architecturally minded photographs witness a river and dense, wet bushland, bordered by towering, symmetrical concrete arches, storm water drains and bridge undersides. It is only when we notice the tiny, distant human figures – one per photograph – that things begin to take a turn. Captured warily surveying the landscape, Mutch’s subjects seem alienated from their surroundings. They investigate their environs with what appears a combination trepidation and wonder. The allusion seems one of a post-urban future. Lost in a concrete metropolis for too long, Mutch’s Tourists are returning to city’s forgotten green underbelly. Tues to Sat noon–6pm, until March 13.

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